经济与社会研究院SEMINAR第152期

题目：Health, Health Insurance, and Income Inequality

主讲人：陈超然, 新加坡国立大学

时间：2019年5月10日，13:30-14:45

地点：暨南大学中惠楼106B室

主讲人简介：

Chaoran Chen, Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. He received his Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Toronto in 2017. His research interests are in macroeconomics and economic development. His work focuses on understanding the observed cross-country productivity differences through the lens of resource misallocation, structural transformation, and technology adoption, using both general equilibrium models and micro data. He is also interested in incomplete market models and inequality.

Abstract:

Individuals’ income affects their health status through the choice of health insurance coverage. We build a quantitative framework with incomplete markets and three shocks: health, health expenditure, and income. Individuals can choose to purchase health insurance, which hedges against health expenditure shocks and affects the transition of health status. We then estimate the model using micro data from PSID and MEPS. The estimated model can replicate the stylized facts on health insurance and inequality in the U.S. data. In the quantitative analysis, we find that endogenizing health through insurance choice substantially amplifies the impact of bad health on income inequality, due to the feedback effect that poor individuals are less likely to have insurance, and hence more likely to become unhealthy and then become poorer. The existence of consumption floor is the main cause of un-insurance among individuals. We also find that universal health insurance policy has a larger welfare gain in our framework than in a framework with exogenous health: it not only hedges against medical expenditure shocks, but also reduces health disparity and then income inequality.