Lifestyle Behaviors and Wealth-Health Gaps in Germany

IF 6.6 1区 经济学 Q1 ECONOMICS
Econometrica Pub Date : 2024-09-27 DOI:10.3982/ECTA20603
Lukas Mahler, Minchul Yum
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Abstract

We document significant gaps in wealth across health status over the life cycle in Germany—a country with a universal healthcare system and negligible out-of-pocket medical expenses. To investigate the underlying sources of these wealth-health gaps, we build a heterogeneous-agent life-cycle model in which health and wealth evolve endogenously. In the model, agents exert efforts to lead a healthy lifestyle, which helps maintain good health status in the future. Effort choices, or lifestyle behaviors, are subject to adjustment costs to capture their habitual nature in the data. We find that our estimated model generates the great majority of the empirical wealth gaps by health and quantify the role of earnings and savings channels through which health affects these gaps. We show that variations in individual health efforts account for around a quarter of the model-generated wealth gaps by health, illustrating their role as an amplification mechanism behind the gaps.

Abstract Image

德国的生活方式和财富-健康差距
我们记录了德国在生命周期中不同健康状况下的巨大财富差距--德国实行全民医疗保健制度,自付医疗费用几乎可以忽略不计。为了研究这些财富-健康差距的根本原因,我们建立了一个健康和财富内生发展的异质性代理人生命周期模型。在该模型中,代理人努力追求健康的生活方式,这有助于在未来保持良好的健康状况。努力选择或生活方式行为需要付出调整成本,以反映其在数据中的习惯性。我们发现,我们估计的模型产生了绝大多数按健康状况划分的经验财富差距,并量化了收入和储蓄渠道对这些差距的影响。我们表明,个人健康努力的变化约占模型产生的健康状况财富差距的四分之一,这说明它们是差距背后的放大机制。
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来源期刊
Econometrica
Econometrica 社会科学-数学跨学科应用
CiteScore
11.00
自引率
3.30%
发文量
75
审稿时长
6-12 weeks
期刊介绍: Econometrica publishes original articles in all branches of economics - theoretical and empirical, abstract and applied, providing wide-ranging coverage across the subject area. It promotes studies that aim at the unification of the theoretical-quantitative and the empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking. It explores a unique range of topics each year - from the frontier of theoretical developments in many new and important areas, to research on current and applied economic problems, to methodologically innovative, theoretical and applied studies in econometrics. Econometrica maintains a long tradition that submitted articles are refereed carefully and that detailed and thoughtful referee reports are provided to the author as an aid to scientific research, thus ensuring the high calibre of papers found in Econometrica. An international board of editors, together with the referees it has selected, has succeeded in substantially reducing editorial turnaround time, thereby encouraging submissions of the highest quality. We strongly encourage recent Ph. D. graduates to submit their work to Econometrica. Our policy is to take into account the fact that recent graduates are less experienced in the process of writing and submitting papers.
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