International Differences in Longevity and Health and their Economic Consequences

Pierre-Carl Michaud, Dana Goldman, Darius Lakdawalla, Adam Gailey and Yuhui Zheng

No 15235, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of near-elderly Americans, relative to their European peers. In particular, we use a microsimulation approach to project what US longevity would look like, if US health trends approximated those in Europe. We find that differences in health can explain most of the growing gap in remaining life expectancy. In addition, we quantify the public finance consequences of this deterioration in health. The model predicts that gradually moving American cohorts to the health status enjoyed by Europeans could save up to $1.1 trillion in discounted total health expenditures from 2004 to 2050.

JEL-codes: I10 I38 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Michaud, P.-C., D. Goldman, D. Lakdawalla, A. Gailey and Y. Zheng (2011): "Differences in Health between Americans and Western Europeans: Effects on Longevity and Public Finance", Social Science and Medicine 73:2, pp. 254-263.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15235.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: International Differences in Longevity and Health and Their Economic Consequences (2009)
Working Paper: International Differences in Longevity and Health and their Economic Consequences (2009)
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:nbr:nberwo:15235

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15235

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().