Medical and long-term care with endogenous health and longevity

Johannes Schünemann, Holger Strulik and Timo Trimborn

No 505, FSES Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland

Abstract: For the population over 65, nursery care expenditures constitute on average the largest share in total health expenditures. In this paper, we distinguish between medical care, intended to improve one�s state of health, and personal care required for daily routine. Personal care can be either carried out autonomously or by a third party. In the course of aging, autonomous personal care is eventually substituted by nursery care. We set up a life-cycle model in which individuals are subject to physiological aging, calibrate it with data from gerontology, and analyze the interplay between medical and nursery care. We replicate health behavior and life expectancy of individuals and in particular the empirically observed patterns of medical and nursery care expenditure. We then analyze the impact of better health and rising life expectancy, triggered by rising income and medical progress, on the expected cost of nursery care in the future. We predict an elasticity of nursery care expenditure with respect to life expectancy of 1/3. In terms of present value at age 20, life-time nursery care expenditure is predicted to decline with rising life expectancy.

JEL-codes: D11 D91 I12 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2019-09-03, Revised 2020-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-for and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doc.rero.ch/record/328021/files/WP_SES_505_revised_.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:fri:fribow:fribow00505

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://doc.rero.ch/record/328021

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FSES Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland Bd de Pérolles 90, CH-1700 Fribourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mustapha Obbad ().