The Effect of Home Care on Chest Pain, Body Pain and Fall: An Empirical Study from CHARLS Data Using Propensity Score Matching

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to investigate the causal effects of home care on the elder people's physical health outcomes which mainly deals with body pain, chest pain and fall. We address the selection bias by using propensity score matching in the estimation process. We find that the elder people who were accompanied with home care in their daily life are less likely to have fall incidence. For the chest pain, we find that home care can help the elder people to reduce the probability of feeling chest pain. However, home care has no significant effects on body pain. Our results indicate that we should provide more home care to the elder people's body pain to prevent the depreciation of their health capital. Keywords—home care, physical health outcomes, propensity score matching