Rural pensions, intra-household bargaining, and elderly medical expenditure in China.
China
elderly
intra-household bargaining
medical expenditures
pension
regression discontinuity design
Journal
Health economics
ISSN: 1099-1050
Titre abrégé: Health Econ
Pays: England
ID NLM: 9306780
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
10 2023
10 2023
Historique:
revised:
05
06
2023
received:
18
03
2022
accepted:
12
06
2023
medline:
4
9
2023
pubmed:
7
7
2023
entrez:
7
7
2023
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
China's rural elderly spend less on medical expenditures as they age despite declining health, raising welfare concerns. This paper investigates the role of intrahousehold bargaining power on health expenditures of the elderly by evaluating the impact of cash transfers from a new social pension program. The program provided windfall payments to those above age 60, making it possible to employ a regression discontinuity design based on age of eligibility to estimate causal effects. Using data from the 2011 and 2013 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we find that receiving pension payments increases both the utilization of outpatient care and outpatient expenditures by the elderly who experienced illness. This result is robust to controlling for total household expenditures per capita, ruling out income effects as the main channel. Consistent with pensions increasing elderly bargaining power, we find that pensions significantly increase medical expenditures only for those elderly who co-reside with children or grandchildren but have no effect on those who live independently.
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
2353-2371Informations de copyright
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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