Health and the savings of insured versus uninsured, working-age households in the U.S

Jonathan Hartley and Maude Toussaint-Comeau

No WP-09-23, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of a decline in health on the savings and portfolio choice of young, working individuals and the differences between insured and uninsured cohorts using the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that insured individuals are significantly likely to divest from risky asset holdings in response to a decline in health, controlling for variables such as income, age, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. Unlike many previous papers, which dismiss health and portfolio choice associations among retired individuals on the basis of unobserved heterogeneity, we find that our results for working individuals are robust when using fixed effects models in a three-year longitudinal panel. Consistent with an overall theory of risk, we find that the relationship between an onset of poor health and an increased aversion to risky assets among the insured is strongest (only apparent) among married-couple households.

Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publicati ... s/2009/wp2009_23.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:fip:fedhwp:wp-09-23

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 ().