Fertility and health insurance types in Germany

Robert Stelter

No 2016021, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: In this paper I study how different health insurance types in Germany alter the incentives to give birth. A stylized model illustrates that both the private and statutory health insurance can imply a higher number of births. While the family insurance in the latter clearly reduces the costs per child, income effects due to varying parental premia might operate in the opposite direction. If they are higher in the statutory health insurance, for instance, due to a selection of healthy individuals in the private health insurance, the latter might induce a higher number of births. Relying on data of the German Socio Economic Panel, I apply endogenous treatment effects models for count data to control for selection effects. Estimation results indicate that the private health insurance positively affects the number of births. The positive impact is robust across several alternative specifications.

Keywords: Dual health insurance system; Fertility; Health insurance choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 83
Date: 2016-09-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2016021.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvir:2016021

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Virginie LEBLANC ().