 Coping with the consequences of short‐term illness shocks: The role of intra‐household labor substitutionAbhishek Dureja and Digvijay Negi () Health Economics, 2022, vol. 31, issue 7, 1402-1422 Abstract: In developing countries where medical infrastructure, service delivery systems, and the markets for health insurance are underdeveloped, one important mechanism to cope with the consequences of health shocks is the intra‐household substitution of labor. This paper studies the impact of short‐term illness shocks on labor supply and wage earnings of prime‐aged individuals using data from agricultural households in India. It also documents the compensating intra‐household labor supply responses of other non‐ill members of the household. We find that an illness shock reduces an individual's monthly wage earnings by 7.1% via the decline in the individual's days of employment in the labor market. Further, an illness shock to the household head causes a compensating increase in the wage labor supply of the wife. An illness shock to the wife, however, induces the household head to devote more time to domestic activities. The compensating labor supply responses are only partially able to insure the loss in total wage income of the household. Our results indicate that the gender‐based specialization of labor weakens in the event of an illness shock. Date: 2022 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:31:y:2022:i:7:p:1402-1422 Access Statistics for this article Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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