Seminar Vol. 217
Title: What is in "Moral Hazard"? Evidence from Quasi Experiments in China
Speaker: Wei Huang, National University of Singapore
Time: April 27th, 2020 13:30-15:00
About the speaker:
Huang Wei is the President’s Assistant Professor in the Department of Real Estate and the Department of Strategy and Policy at National University of Singapore. Prior to joining NUS, Huang was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Aging and Health Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Huang received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2016. His research fields are Public Economics, Labor Economics, and Health Economics. He is interested in the topics such as health, education, ethnicity, and China. His research work has been published in Review of Economic and Statistics, Journal of Labor Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Nature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, etc. He is an editor of Economics of Transition.
Abstract:
We explore two different natural experiments in urban China using administrative data with more than 3 million observations to estimate the price elasticity and income elasticity o healthcare utilization. First, we exploit a sharp reduction in inpatient cost sharing at age 80 in one city, using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to examine its effect on utilization. The price elasticity of inpatient care usage ranges from -0.15 to -0.32. The effects are larger for poorer populations. Second, we explore the timing of pension increases in different years, using an event study approach to estimate their impacts on healthcare usage. For the same population, we find that the income elasticity of inpatient care usage ranges from 1.3-2.0, which suggests that 40-60 percent of the moral hazard is overestimated because of income effect. For the poorer population, approximately 50-70 percent of the price elasticity could be explained by income effect. Finally, the reduced cost sharing is associated with significantly lower out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditures but has little impact on mortality. (JEL: H55, I13, I18, J14)
Interested in this webinar? Please contact Feiyan at feiyantang@jnu.edu.cn, or scan the QR code bellow to register by April 25th (12 PM).
