This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. We analyze these choices within the framework of a life-cycle model that features exogenous changes in family composition, heterogeneity in lifetime income, and uninsurable fluctuations in earnings and medical costs. Our analysis indicates that marit...

Estimating the Income Loss of Disabled Individuals: The Case of Spain In this paper, we present both a theoretical and an empirical model in order to identify the effects of disability on wages. In the theoretical model we assume that the wage gap of a disabled worker depends on a permanent and a transitory productivity gap and the model predicts that the wage gap will be lower after gaining so...

I examine the joint determination of health plan choice and subsequent health care utilization in the Medicare managed care and supplemental insurance markets. The objectives are to evaluate the welfare impact of the Medicare managed care program taking into account the effect of endogenous selection, and to advance the applied literature on health plan choice and health care demand. Standard m...

The Role of Early-Life Conditions in the Cognitive Decline due to Adverse Events Later in Life Cognitive functioning of elderly individuals may be affected by events such as the loss of a (grand)child or partner or the onset of a serious chronic condition, and by negative economic shocks such as job loss or the reduction of pension benefits. It is conceivable that the impact of such events is s...

The Evolution of Income-Related Inequalities in Health Care Utilization in Switzerland over Time This study investigates equity in access to health care in Switzerland over time, using nationwide representative survey data from 1982, 1992, 1997 and 2002. Both simple quintile distributions and concentration indices are used to assess horizontal equity, i.e. the extent to which adults in equal ne...

Mental Health and Working Conditions in European Countries Increased pressure for labour market flexibility and increasing demand over workers’ performance have fostered the idea that working conditions, in most European countries, have progressively deteriorated with adverse effects on psychological well being and mental health. This paper investigates the links between contractual arrangement...

The observation that average health care expenditure rises with age generally leads experts and laymen alike to conclude that population ageing is the main driver of health care costs. In recently published studies we challenged this view (Zweifel et al., 1999 and Felder et al., 2000). Analysing health care expenditure of deceased persons, we showed that age is insignificant if proximity to dea...

Aggregation and the Estimated Effects of Local Economic Conditions on Health This paper considers the relationship between local economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with moreand less-disaggregated analyses – including an investigation of the migratory response to changing economic conditions – I ...

Fast-Food Restaurant Advertising on Television and Its Influence on Youth Body Composition We examine the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on television on the body composition of adolescents as measured by percentage body fat (PBF) and to assess the sensitivity of these effects to using conventional measures of youth obesity based on bodymass index (BMI). We merge measures of body c...

The Ramsey model of economic growth is revisited from the point of view of viability compared to optimality. A viable state is a state from which there exists at least one trajectory in capital, consumption, and reproduction that remains in the set of constraints of minimal consumption and positive wealth. There exists a largest set of viable states, including all others, called the viability k...