Author: Daifeng HePublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
Three Essays on Long-term Care and Life Insurance
Author: Daifeng HeEssays on Long-term Care Insurance
Author: Angie AhmadiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Long-term care insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on long-term care (LTC) in old age and the low ownership of private long-term care insurance (LTCI). Older adults in the US face significant risk of needing long-term care services. Despite the risk, most Americans never attempt to insure against it, and those who do tend to apply late in life when they are likely to be rejected. The first essay in this dissertation builds a quantitative equilibrium model to study consumers' decision about when to buy LTCI in the presence of uninsurability risk. The model evaluates how much of the delay in purchase can be explained by risk misperceptions. I formulate the problem as a three-period model where consumers may buy insurance in a competitive market based on their observable risk characteristics during the first two periods in order to insure against nursing home risk in the third period. I estimate the model using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The model successfully reproduces the low ownership rates and timing of purchase across all income quintiles. I find that risk misperceptions lead to 42% lower than optimal purchase rate, and cause 29% of early buyers to delay their purchase. The sub-optimal behavior is particularly pronounced among the middle-income consumers. The second essay studies the patterns of LTC risk and LTCI purchase across race and ethnicity in the US. By 2050, the share of Blacks and Hispanics in the over-85 population is expected to increase to 40%. A better understanding of risk and insurance across different segments of the aging population is particularly important, given this increasing racial heterogeneity in older adults. Using the HRS, this chapter studies racial disparities in late-in-life health outcomes and estimates the risk of having a nursing home stay over lifetime across race and ethnicity. It finds that Blacks and Hispanics have a lower risk of entering a nursing home than Whites. The paper also examines differences in the likelihood of LTCI purchase across different racial and ethnic groups. The findings suggest that once demographic, socioeconomic, and family characteristics are accounted for, non-Whites are not less likely to buy insurance.
Two Essays on Long-term Care Insurance
Author: Yanling GeThree Essays on Retirement Wealth
Author: Lina WalkerThree Essays on Health and Health Care in Society
Author: Nathaniel Lane WadePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bioethics
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Each of the three essays in this dissertation examine an aspect of health or health care in society. Areas explored within this dissertation include health care as a public value, proscriptive genomic policies, and socio-technical futures of the human lifespan. The first essay explores different forms of health care systems and attempts to understand who believes access to health care is a public value. Using a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. citizens, this study presents statistically significant empirical evidence regarding values and other attributes that predict the probability of individuals within age-based cohorts identifying access to health care as a public value. In the second essay, a menu of policy recommendations for federal regulators is proposed in order to address the lack of uniformity in current state laws concerning genetic information. The policy recommendations consider genetic information as property, privacy protections for re-identifying de-identified genomic information, the establishment of guidelines for law enforcement agencies to access nonforensic databases in criminal investigations, and anti-piracy protections for individuals and their genetic information. The third and final essay explores the socio-technical artifacts of the current health care system for documenting both life and death to understand the potential for altering the future of insurance, the health care delivery system, and individual health outcomes. Through the development of a complex scenario, this essay explores the long-term socio-technical futures of implementing a technology that continuously collects and stores genetic, environmental, and social information from life to death of individual participants.
Insurance and Behavioral Economics
Author: Howard C. KunreutherPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521845726
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
This book examines the behavior of individuals at risk and insurance industry policy makers involved in selling, buying and regulation.
Essays on Healthcare, Long-term Care and Retirement
Author: Aikaterini GousiaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical economics
Languages : en
Pages : 141
Book Description
This thesis focuses on three distinct topics around healthcare and ageing. The first chapter assess the effectiveness of the current regime that regulates the entry and geographical distribution of pharmacies in Italy. Using a structural model from the recent literature on entry I find that the public interest view is not supported in the Italian case. Alternative policies that combine entry deregulation and markup reduction are found to achieve the same if not better geographical coverage by pharmacies, higher supply of pharmaceutical services, entry by new pharmacists and important government savings. The second chapter seeks to see whether financial literacy can be a factor that affects demand for private long-term care insurance. Using detailed data from the Health and Retirement Study I construct two comprehensive indices for financial literacy that capture various aspects and degrees of financial skills and knowledge. Using an instrumental variables approach I find that those with higher financial literacy are more likely to own private long-term care insurance. The third chapter investigates the effect of gradual retirement on a variety of health outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity approach I find that partial retirement has a preserving health effect in old age contrary to full time work that is found to deteriorate health. The effect of partial retirement on health is in fact larger in magnitude, suggesting that the health effects of working are non linear in old age.
Three Essays on Health and Aging
Author: Lauren E. W. OlshoThree Essays on the Economics of Health and Well-Being
Author: Paul J. SpinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation offers three vignettes on the determinants of health and well-being over the life course. The first essay uses multiple Canadian census files to document the longterm effects of potential in utero exposure to the 1918 flu pandemic on educational attainment. This study finds that those who were in utero during the peak of the pandemic, particularly in their first or second trimesters, experienced long-term deficits in their educational attainment. The second study explores the potential impact of spousal institutionalization in nursing homes/residential care facilities on elderly financial security. It shows that the absence of fully funded universal long-term care insurance (like Canadian medicare) places married seniors at risk of significant losses in their material standards of living and low income status. The third paper examines the impact of online communication and social media use on subjective well-being (SWB). In one empirical approach, I find that those who communicate online or use social media report lower levels of SWB. This is especially true for older adults and social media. In a separate quasi-experimental analysis that exploits variation in access to and use of social media by time, age group, and access to personal computers, I find that social media may be responsible for increased political engagement and social trust.
Three Essays on Household Portfolio Choice
Author: Tae-Young PakPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
This dissertation considers household portfolio choice at the end of life-cycle. Three essays examine the importance of uncertainty about medical expenditure risk, cognitive aging, and subjective life horizon, and their role in explaining late-life savings decisions and portfolio allocation. Chapter 2 of the dissertation, entitled "Medical expenditure risk and precautionary saving: Evidence from Medicare Part D", tests the presence of precautionary saving motive to cope with medical expenditure risk. By examining Medicare Part D and it's association with household saving, I demonstrate that social insurance programs discourage private saving by reducing health-related uncertainty. Chapter 3 of the dissertation, entitled "Econometric analysis of cognitive abilities and portfolio choice", explores the role of cognitive aging in explaining a portfolio rebalancing towards safer assets at the end of life-cycle. In this essay, I argue that a gradual decrease in risky asset ownership at the end of life-cycle is in part driven by losing cognitive capabilities. I pay particular attention to testing whether such association is observed only on the extensive margin - that is, changes in ownership, or both risky asset ownership and reallocation across the intensive margin are affected. Causality is tested by exploiting exogenous variation in cognitive health, created by the introduction of Medicare Part D in 2006. Chapter 4 of the dissertation, entitled "Subjective life expectancy and portfolio choice: A household bargaining approach", examines collective decision-making when spouses have an incentive to bargain over portfolio allocation. This article starts with two well-known facts: (a) difference in life expectancy between husband and wife; and (b) age disparity in marriage. These two facts imply that females, on average, face 5 or 6 years longer retirement period to finance, and thus have more incentive to hold risky assets to achieve higher expected capital gains in the long-term. A difference in life expectancy then creates an incentive to bargain over how to allocate savings to risky and non-risky assets. The estimation results indeed show that more financial wealth is allocated to risky assets when a spouse with longer life expectancy has the "final say."