The Challenge of Organizing Elderly Care Programmes: Optimal Policy Design under Complete and Asymmetric Information

Lucia Leporatti () and Marcello Montefiori

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2020, vol. 20, issue 1, 15

Abstract: The increasing life expectancy poses challenges on the future sustainability of long-term care services that today strongly depend on informal care provided within the family by working age children. Ongoing social changes are likely to weaken the informal provision of care. The paper derives optimal policies to help the policy-maker to choose innovative and sustainable solutions to support home care, taking into account the severity of health condition and the different opportunity costs of carers. Drawing inspiration from real world policies, the suitable policy combines lump-sum transfers, paid permissions from work and in-kind provisions. In some circumstances, benefits can favour higher rather than lower income individuals. In the context of information asymmetry, the implementation of the second-best outcome requires the level of care of the most subsidized households’ to be forced towards certain targets to avoid adverse selection.

Keywords: informal care; home care; ageing; asymmetric information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 H42 I18 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2019-0194 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:bejeap:v:20:y:2020:i:1:p:15:n:12

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2019-0194

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().