Essays on Health Care Consumption and Household Finance PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Essays on Health Care Consumption and Household Finance PDF full book. Access full book title Essays on Health Care Consumption and Household Finance by Tal A. Gross. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Tal A. Gross Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 111
Book Description
(cont.) This paper studies the transition in insurance status as teenagers move from their family's coverage to uninsured status or other insurance plans. I find no evidence that teenagers stock up on medical care before coverage ends, but rather a general decrease in health care consumption in the last month of coverage.
Author: Tal A. Gross Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 111
Book Description
(cont.) This paper studies the transition in insurance status as teenagers move from their family's coverage to uninsured status or other insurance plans. I find no evidence that teenagers stock up on medical care before coverage ends, but rather a general decrease in health care consumption in the last month of coverage.
Author: Madeline Reed Jones Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Health care costs are a growing concern for households with limited resources. Cost-sharing in health plans requires people to pay for health care in the form of deductibles, co-payments, and out-of-pocket expenses and is becoming more widespread. This dissertation adds to the research on the role of liquidity in health care by investigating policies that provide households with increased income. I use restricted Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data, Census Household Pulse Survey data, and a quasi-experimental methodology to investigate the relationship between liquidity and health care decision-making.The findings show that an increase in liquidity in the form of tax refunds is not associated with an increase in health care seeking for lower-income adults. There is suggestive evidence of heterogeneity in the effects of liquidity by health plan enrollment as well as for the type of care, however. Mental health care, which often is more discretionary and has large out-of-pocket costs, appears to be impacted by increased income. Additional barriers to mental health care exist including a lack of access to providers, although, this research finds legislation that allows licensed psychologists to work across state lines may lead to reductions in delays to get care. This research provides insight into the effect of liquidity and state-level policies on household decision-making. These studies are important given the rising cost-sharing and increasing reports of cost-related barriers to health care.
Author: Sharada Sridhar Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Chapter 3 studies the efficiency of government healthcare subsidization schemes, with a specific interest in the underlying mechanisms that financially motivate hospitals to serve the uninsured. We study a Disproportionate Care Hospital (DSH) payment scheme that supports hospitals treating a disproportionately higher fraction of uninsured patients. We demonstrate that DSH payments lead to social welfare loss, especially in a system with large and small hospitals, compared to the second-best mechanism. We then use the setting of the Global Payment Program (GPP) program, which compliments DSH by providing primary care, to show that direct and assured payment for primary care improves social welfare. Overall, my dissertation seeks to understand the development of an equilibrium contract structure between financial institutions and the poor, examine methods of greater efficiency, and evaluate the impact of government interventions to alleviate tensions between these parties.
Author: Samantha Zeller Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation explores the impacts of shocks to healthcare costs and access on households and firms.The first chapter studies the impact of recent changes in abortion access on household finances. I exploit variation in changes in access to abortion resulting from Planned Parenthood clinic openings and closings during the period 2010-2019 to study the relationship between access to abortion and financial health (delinquencies). I find that auto loan delinquencies are negatively related to access to abortion, a relationship which is unique when compared to other types of loans (i.e., credit cards, mortgages, and student loans). I show that this effect is driven by changes in access in low-income areas, shedding light on the mechanism as well as the significance of auto loans, which are disproportionately held by low-income individuals (e.g., compared to mortgages). I provide further evidence of the causality of the relationship between access to abortion and auto loan delinquencies by exploiting a 2013 legislative change in Texas. Finally, I use these estimates to calculate the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 on financial health.The second chapter explores the connection between rising healthcare costs and declining small business employment and startup rates. I use private equity (PE) acquisitions of hospitals during the period 2002-2017 as a shock to local healthcare prices in order to study the effect of increasing healthcare costs on the composition of firms in local economies using a difference-in-differences framework. I use confidential Census Bureau data to show first that PE acquisitions of hospitals indeed affect the health insurance premiums charged by insurers to local employers. Turning to the economic implications, I show that smaller firms face both increased barriers to entry and decreased firm resilience following a PE-induced increase in health insurance premiums; firms with 20 or fewer employees are less likely to enter the market, while firms with between 11 and 50 employees who do still enter face a higher probability of exit.This dissertation has important policy implications, showing the significance of recent trends in healthcare to both firms and individuals.
Author: Fernando Lopez (Professor of finance) Publisher: ISBN: Category : Electronic dissertations Languages : en Pages : 121
Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the determinants of individual financial decision making and the welfare implications of those decisions. In the first essay, I consider an important dimension of individual welfare, namely mental health, to study whether the use of different financial services helped to withstand the damage caused by a large earthquake that hit Chile in February 2010. Using a rich nationally representative panel data set and geographic differences in ground shaking caused by the earthquake as an exogenous source of damage, I find that earthquake insurance reduced the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by more than 50% among individuals who lived in properties that were damaged by the earthquake. However, I find no significant effects for the amount of savings and bank relationships. Overall, these results suggest that the welfare impact of financial services is driven by the ability to transfer resources across states of the world, but not through time. In the second essay, I study the extent to which low income students in the U.S. understand and take into consideration the financial aspects of their higher education. Using a rich data set from a large U.S. non-profit organization, I find that low income post-secondary students are poorly informed about three main financial aspects of their higher education: expected income, financing costs and opportunity cost of being enrolled. This result holds for students who are academically talented, have been exposed to financial education (including a semester-long personal finance class) and relevant financial experiences. Furthermore, preliminary results of a randomized controlled trial (N=117) suggest that an hour-long financial education workshop on the main financial aspects of college increases students' GPA by 0.2 points (p-value=0.15) and their ability to receive financial aid from the non-profit organization by 11.4 percentage points (p-value=0.25). Overall, these results suggest that (lack of) financial literacy can affect both educational attainment and financial outcomes of low income post-secondary students. In the third essay, I study if civic capital, defined as the set of values and beliefs within a community that promote cooperation for socially valuable purposes (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2011), affects the use of deposit accounts among Chilean households. Using an institutional setting of limited supply side barriers for access to deposit accounts and a rich household data set, I find that households from areas with higher levels of civic capital, measured as the rate of registration to vote, are more likely to have savings accounts and hold larger amounts in those accounts. This association is stronger for households that are less educated and less intensive users of communication and information devices such as phone, computer and the internet. These results are consistent with the idea that civic capital helps to overcome educational and informational barriers that limit the demand for deposit accounts.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
Chapter 1: Recently enacted state laws that limit how much hospitals can charge uninsured patients provide a unique opportunity to study how financial incentives of healthcare providers affect the care they deliver. Using an event study framework, we find that these fair pricing laws lead to a seven to nine percent reduction in the average length of hospital stay for uninsured patients. Although the longer-term effects of these care reductions are uncertain, they are not accompanied by worsening of short-term measures of quality of care. Overall, our results provide strong evidence that hospitals actively alter their behavior in response to financial incentives, and are consistent with the laws promoting a shift towards more efficient care delivery. Chapter 2: The list price for an average unit of care is more than three times what a hospital will be paid for treating a typical patient, and different hospitals charge widely different prices for the same service. These facts may seem innocuous, but many uninsured and out-of-network patients do pay list price. This paper uncovers patterns in hospital list prices, and explores several potential explanations. We find that markups vary much more across hospitals than within, but geography and quality of care explain little of the overall variation. Further, large, urban, well-equipped, for-profit hospitals have the highest list prices. A quirk in the Medicare Outlier Payment formula appears to have contributed to rapid price increases prior to 2004. Overall, our findings are consistent with more financially-sophisticated and profit-motivated hospitals more aggressively pursuing revenue from uninsured and out-of-network patients. Chapter 3: Many researchers and policy makers worry that Americans are not saving adequately for retirement. However, it is difficult to agree upon what constitutes adequate savings. This paper compares wealth accumulation patterns of different cohorts of Americans born in the first half of the 20th century. This comparative standard frames the retirement prospects of future and recent retirees in terms of the documented retirement experiences of older generations. Contrary to common perception, I find that the wealth accumulation of Americans nearing and entering retirement today is very similar to that of older generations.
Author: National Research Council Publisher: National Academies Press ISBN: 0309264146 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
Author: You Du Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 97
Book Description
This dissertation examines the effect of health and its associated variables on households' consumption and portfolio choices over life cycle. The first two essays constitute my job market paper, which explains why the risky portfolio share rises in wealth from two health mechanisms: endogenous health investment and medical expenditure risk. The third chapter explores the effect of health and health risk on households' optimal consumption and portfolio decisions over life cycle. Chapter 1 titled ``PORTFOLIO CHOICE AND HEALTH ACROSS WEALTH: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE" illustrates the empirical relationship between the portfolio puzzle and the heterogeneity of health variables across wealth. Classic financial theory suggests that under the assumption of no borrowing constraints and no mean-reverting stock returns, households should hold a constant risky portfolio in spite of their wealth, ages and life horizons (Samuelson (1969) and Merton (1969, 1971)). Yet data from the Survey of Consumers Finances (SCF) show that the risky portfolio share of financial assets increases in wealth. In the literature, this is called the ``portfolio puzzle". Meanwhile, various sources of data indicate that, compared with the non-wealthy households, the wealthy people have better health, longer life horizon, higher out of pocket medical spending with lower uncertainty, and more health care time. All these facts suggest a novel correlation between the portfolio puzzle and the heterogeneity of health variables across wealth and provide a robust empirical foundation to explain the portfolio puzzle from a health perspective. In Chapter 2 titled ``A LIFE CYCLE MODEL OF PORTFOLIO CHOICE AND HEALTH", a life cycle model with endogenous health investment and medical expenditure risk is proposed to capture the key empirical features in the first chapter. This calibrated model remarkably matches the U.S. data. I find that endogenous health investment is essential to explain the portfolio puzzle: if health is exogenous without investment, the model can only could deliver 7.2% of the risky share gap across wealth. Medical expenditure risk is less important and has a larger effect on the non-wealthy group. If I abstract from medical expenditure risk, the risky shares increase for both groups: 24% for the low wealth group and 5% for the wealthy group. This life cycle model provides new insights into how health affects households' financial behavior. Chapter 3 titled ``OPTIMAL CONSUMPTION AND PORTFOLIO CHOICE WITH HEALTH RISK" investigates the effect of health and health risk on households' optimal consumption and portfolio allocations over the life cycle. The simulation results show that consumption, savings in bonds, and savings in stocks all increase with health. The risky portfolio share, which is the ratio of savings in stocks to the total financial assets, demonstrates the same tendency for both health states over the life cycle: at the very young age, the risky portfolio share is relatively high. Starting from the middle age, this share falls significantly and keeps steady until the end of life. For most of the lifetime, the risky portfolio share is positively related with health. These results emphasize the importance of health and its associated risk in consumption and portfolio decisions.
Author: Tal A. Gross
Author: Tal A. Gross
Author: Madeline Reed Jones
Author: Sharada Sridhar
Author: Samantha Zeller
Author: Fernando Lopez (Professor of finance)
Author: Caitlin McKennie
Author: 
Author: National Research Council
Author: Martin Salm
Author: You Du