The impact of medical and nursing home expenses and social insurance

We consider a life-cycle model with idiosyncratic risk in labor earnings, out-of-pocket medical and nursing home expenses, and survival. Partial insurance is available through welfare, Medicaid, and social security. Calibrating the model to the United States, we find that 12 percent of aggregate savings is accumulated to finance and self-insure against old-age health expenses given the absence of complete public health care for the elderly and that nursing home expenses play an important role in the savings of the wealthy and on aggregate. Moreover, we find that the aggregate and distributional effects of public health care provision are highly dependent on the availability of other programs making up the social insurance system.

The Impact of Medical and Nursing Home Expenses and Social Insurance Policies on Savings and Inequality

We consider a life-cycle model with idiosyncratic risk in labor earnings, out-of-pocket medical and nursing home expenses, and survival. Partial insurance is available through welfare, Medicaid, and social security. Calibrating the model to the U.S., we find that nursing home expenses play an important role in the savings of the wealthy. In our policy analysis, we find that elimination of out-of-pocket expenses through public health care would reduce the capital stock by 12 percent, Medicaid and old-age welfare programs crowd out 44 percent of savings and greatly increase wealth inequality, and social security effects are influenced by out-of-pocket health expenses.social insurance; medical expenses, nursing home expenses; wealth inequality; savings

How Important is Human Capital? A Quantitative Theory Assessment of World Income Inequality

We develop a quantitative theory of human capital investments in order to evaluate the magnitude of cross-country differences in total factor productivity (TFP) that explains the variation in per-capita incomes across countries. We build a heterogeneous-agent economy with cross-sectional variation in ability, schooling, and expenditures on schooling quality. By embedding our analysis in a growth model with tradable and non-tradable sectors, we model sectorial productivity differences across countries, as documented in Hsieh and Klenow (2007). The parameters governing human capital production and random ability and taste processes are restricted by a set of cross-sectional data moments such as variances and intergenerational correlations of earnings and schooling, as well as slope coefficient and R-squared in a Mincer regression. Our main finding is that human capital accumulation strongly amplifies TFP differences across countries: To explain a 20-fold difference in the output per worker the model requires a 5-fold difference in the TFP of the tradable sector, versus an 18-fold difference if human capital is fixed across countries. Moreover, we find that sectorial productivity differences play a prominent role in quantitative implications of the theory.output per worker, TFP, human capital, schooling, heterogeneity, inequality

How Important is Human Capital? A Quantitative Theory Assessment of World Income Inequality

We develop a quantitative theory of human capital investment in order to evaluate the magnitude of cross-country differences in total factor productivity (TFP) that explains the variation in per-capita incomes across countries. We build a heterogeneous-agent economy with cross-sectional variation in ability, schooling, and expenditures on schooling quality. In our theory, the parameters governing human capital production and random ability process have important implications for a set of cross-sectional statistics - Mincer return, variance of earnings, variance of schooling, and intergenerational correlation of earnings. These restrictions of the theory and U.S. household data are used to pin down the key parameters driving the quantitative implications of the theory. Our main finding is that human capital accumulation strongly amplifies TFP differences across countries. In particular, we find an elasticity of output per worker with respect to TFP of 2.8: a 3-fold difference in TFP explains a 20-fold difference in output per worker. We argue that the cross-country differences in human capital implied by the theory are consistent with a wide array of evidence including earnings of immigrants in the United States, average mincer returns across countries, and the relationship between average years of schooling and per-capita income across countries. The theory implies that using Mincer returns to measure human capital understates differences across countries by a factor of 2.output per worker, TFP, human capital, heterogeneity, inequality

How important is human capital? A quantitative theory assessment of world income inequality

We develop a quantitative theory of human capital investments in order to evaluate the magnitude of cross-country differences in total factor productivity (TFP) that explains the variation in per-capita incomes across countries. We build a heterogeneous-agent economy with cross-sectional variation in ability, schooling, and expenditures on schooling quality. By embedding our analysis in a growth model with tradable and non-tradable sectors, we model sectorial productivity differences across countries, as documented in Hsieh and Klenow (2007). The parameters governing human capital production and random ability and taste processes are restricted by a set of cross-sectional data moments such as variances and intergenerational correlations of earnings and schooling, as well as slope coefficient and R2 in a Mincer regression. Our main finding is that human capital accumulation strongly amplifies TFP differences across countries: To explain a 20-fold difference in the output per worker the model requires a 5-fold difference in the TFP of the tradable sector, versus an 18-fold difference if human capital is fixed across countries. Moreover, we find that sectorial productivity differences play a prominent role in quantitative implications of the theory.

Nursing Homes in Equilibrium: Implications for Long-term Care Policies

We build an equilibrium model of the market for nursing home care with decision-makers on both sides of the market. The nursing home demand arises as a result of stochastic dynamic optimizations by households heterogeneous in age, health, wealth; and the cost of home-and-community-based care. On the supply side, locally competitive nursing homes decide prices and care intensity. The government pays for the long-term care of the poorest. We estimate the model parameters using Health and Retirement Survey and simulate the model to quantitatively evaluate the effects of long-term care policies on prices, intensities, care allocation, and welfare.U.S. Social Security Administration, RDR18000002-02, UM20-13http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/168220/1/wp414.pdfDescription of wp414.pdf : working paperSEL

The Impact of Medical and Nursing Home Expenses and Social Insurance Policies on Savings and Inequality ∗

We consider a life-cycle model with idiosyncratic risk in labor earnings, out-of-pocket medical and nursing home expenses, and survival. Partial insurance is available through welfare, Medicaid, and social security. Calibrating the model to the U.S., we find that 12 percent of aggregate savings is accumulated to finance and self-insure against oldage health expenses given the absence of complete public health care for the elderly, and that nursing home expenses play an important role in the savings of the wealthy and on aggregate. Moreover, we find that the aggregate and distributional effects of public health care provision are highly dependent on the availability of other programs comprising the social insurance system