Bismarck's Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline

Stefan Bauernschuster, Anastasia Driva () and Erik Hornung
Additional contact information
Anastasia Driva: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

No 11628, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the impact of social health insurance on mortality. Using the introduction of compulsory health insurance in the German Empire in 1884 as a natural experiment, we estimate flexible difference-in-differences models exploiting variation in eligibility for insurance across occupations. Our findings suggest that Bismarck's health insurance generated a significant mortality reduction. Despite the absence of antibiotics and most vaccines, we find the results to be largely driven by a decline of deaths from infectious diseases. We present evidence suggesting that the decline is associated with access to health services but not sick pay. This finding may be explained by insurance fund physicians transmitting new knowledge on infectious disease prevention.

Keywords: demographic transition; mortality; health insurance; Prussia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I13 I18 J11 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea, nep-his and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of the European Economic Association, 2020, 18 (5), 2561-2607

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11628.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bismarck’s Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline (2020)
Working Paper: Bismarck's Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline (2017)
Working Paper: Bismarck's Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline (2017)
Working Paper: Bismarck's Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline (2017)
Working Paper: Bismarck’s Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline (2016)
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:iza:izadps:dp11628

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().