Differential mortality, uncertain medical expenses, and the saving of elderly singles

Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French and John Jones

No WP-05-13, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: People have heterogenous life expectancies: women live longer than men, rich people live longer than poor people, and healthy people live longer than sick people. People are also subject to heterogenous out-of-pocket medical expense risk. We show that all of these dimensions of heterogeneity are large for the elderly. Can these factors explain their lack of asset decumulation even at very advanced ages and the high saving rate of the income-rich elderly? We answer this question in two steps. We first estimate the uncertainty about mortality and outof pocket medical expenditures as functions of sex, health, permanent income, and age. We then formalize a rich structural model of saving behavior for retired single households, and we estimate it by using the method of simulated moments.

Keywords: Savings banks; Medical care, Cost of (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publicati ... s/2005/wp2005_13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Differential Mortality, Uncertain Medical Expenses, and the Saving of Elderly Singles (2006)
Working Paper: Differential Mortality, Uncertain Medical Expenses, and the Saving of Elderly Singles (2006)
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:fip:fedhwp:wp-05-13

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().