Health Care Quality and Economic Inequality

Tullio Jappelli (), Luigi Pistaferri () and Guglielmo Weber ()

No 4542, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We argue that health care quality has an important impact on economic inequality and on saving behaviour. We exploit district-wide variability in health care quality provided by the Italian universal public health system to identify the effect of quality on income inequality, health inequality and precautionary saving. We find that in lower quality districts there is greater income and health dispersion and higher precautionary saving. The analysis carries important insights for the ongoing debate about the validity of the life-cycle model and interesting policy implications for the design of health care systems.

Keywords: health care; Income inequality; precautionary saving (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ltv
Date: Written 2004-08
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