{"title":"Lifestyle Behaviors and Wealth-Health Gaps in Germany","authors":"Lukas Mahler, Minchul Yum","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20603","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n <p>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.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 5","pages":"1697-1733"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20603","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Econometrica","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3982/ECTA20603","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
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.