The Shock of Falling Among Older Americans

Inas Kelly ()

No 23517, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Direct medical costs associated with falls have been shown to be $34 billion in 2013, an underestimate since full costs are not factored in. Using the 1998-2012 waves of the Health and Retirement Study and several econometric methods to address the endogeneity of falls, this study seeks to answer the question of how much worse physical and mental health outcomes are for individuals who fall compared to their steadier counterparts. Results across various specifications suggest that falling leads to lower activities of daily living, more depression, and more psychological problems. It leads to greater probabilities of being in poor health, having heart problems, and having a stroke. These results survive several robustness checks.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
Note: AG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Inas R. Kelly, 2017. "The shock of falling among older Americans," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23517.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:nbr:nberwo:23517

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23517

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 ().