Sickness and death

Arjun Bedi and Robert Sparrow (mail@robertsparrow.net)

ISS Working Papers - General Series from International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague

Abstract: This paper investigates the economic consequences of sickness and death and the manner in which poor urban households in Bangladesh respond to such events. Based on longitudinal data we assess the effects of morbidity and mortality episodes on household income, medical spending, labour supply and consumption. We find that despite maintaining household labour supply, a serious illness exerts a negative effect on household income for the poor. However, the estimates do not reject consumption smoothing. The most prominent response to finance current needs is to borrow from money lenders, which leads to an increase in household debt-to-income ratios with possible detrimental effects on future consumption.

Keywords: Sickness; death; income; labour supply; coping strategies; Bangladesh. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/51366/wp587.pdf (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:ems:euriss:51366

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISS Working Papers - General Series from International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub (peter.vanhuisstede@eur.nl this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).