Do red herrings swim in circles? Controlling for the endogeneity of time to death

Stefan Felder, Andreas Werblow () and Peter Zweifel

Journal of Health Economics, 2010, vol. 29, issue 2, 205-212

Abstract: Studies on the effect of ageing on health care expenditure (HCE) have revealed the importance of controlling for time-to-death (TTD). These studies, however, are subject to possible endogeneity if HCE influences the remaining life expectancy. This paper introduces a 10-year observation period on monthly HCE, socioeconomic characteristics and survivor status to first predict TTD and then use the predicted values as an instrument in the regression for HCE. While exogeneity of TTD has to be rejected, core results concerning the role of TTD rather than age as a determinant of HCE (the 'red herring' hypothesis) are confirmed.

Keywords: Health; care; expenditure; Proximity; to; death; Ageing; 'Red; herring'; hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-6296(09)00142-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jhecon:v:29:y:2010:i:2:p:205-212

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().