End-of-life medical spending: Patterns and household spillovers

Alexander Ahammer and Lea-Karla Matic

No 2026-02, Economics working papers from Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that endof- life spending has grown markedly over time and remains highly dispersed even conditional on diagnosis, with predicted mortality explaining only a small share of the variation. We then study a largely underexplored margin: spillovers onto surviving spouses. Event study estimates show large and persistent changes in spouses’ employment and healthcare use around spousal death. However, these dynamics are essentially invariant to the decedent’s end-of-life spending intensity, a finding that is robust to different measures of spending intensity and to an instrumental variables design exploiting provider-level practice variation. Together, these results are consistent with an important role for inefficiencies in end-of-life care.

Keywords: End-of-life; healthcare expenditure; efficiency; health shock; labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I11 I12 I14 I18 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
Note: English
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jku:econwp:2026-02

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