Getting to the Roots of Long-Term Care Needs: A Regression Tree Analysis

Thomas Bassetti and Vincenzo Rebba (vincenzo.rebba@unipd.it)

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of individual and environmental determinants on physical and cognitive impairment of Europeans aged 50 and older using data drawn from the Survey of Health Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The aim is to understand the different paths that need-related determinants of long-term care might take across individuals. As dependent variables, we consider several measures of physical and cognitive disability which are regressed on a list of covariates which includes biological, health, behavioural, socio-demographic and early-life conditions of individuals. We adopt a methodology that combines the structure of random effects models for longitudinal data with the flexibility of a tree regression method. We show the existence of clusters in the main determinants of functional decline (physical and cognitive). Our findings are in line with the existing literature, but, at the same time, we further characterize previous evidence: 1) cognitive impairment, measured by the results of a memory test, strongly depends on educational attainments, age and respondents’ country of residence; 2) physical impairment, measured through the loss of handgrip strength, basic and instrumental activities of daily living (ADLs, IADLs) and mobility, strongly depends on health and behavioural factors.

Keywords: Long-term care; physical impairment; cognitive impairment; health behaviour; early-life conditions; RE-EM tree analysis; SHARE. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J14 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eur and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/66167/1/MPRA_paper_66167.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/67033/1/MPRA_paper_67033.pdf revised version (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:pra:mprapa:66167

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).