Health, Education, and Welfare

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. Please check back later for the full article.

There has been a rise in recent research regarding the economics on the consequences of population ageing for health care expenditure. The focus of this research is on expenditures in the last years of life and the implications for the age profile of health care spending. One open issue in the literature is whether health care expenditure is so concentrated in the last years before death that the age profiles in spending will change when longevity increases. The previous literature also finds that the age profile of health expenditures, after controlling for time to death, is dependent on the type of health care expenditure that is being predicted. Some studies find that the age is more powerful in predicting long-term care compared to health care expenditures. However, this result appears to depend on the empirical model used.

There are conflicting findings that can be reconciled by carefully reviewing and validating the methods that have been used in the literature. In particular, there are advantages of using a two-part model for health care expenditure, in which health care utilization is allowed to have different determinants on the extensive and the intensive margin. This can be seen when this standard modeling approach is compared to alternatives that require weaker assumptions at the cost of possibly inferior fit to the data. Different proxies are evaluated for morbidity affect the estimated end-of-life costs and age profiles in spending. Using a high-quality health insurance dataset from Germany, which includes all relevant determinants of health and long-term care expenditure, the accuracy of popular methods in predictions of future health and long-term care spending are assessed. The basis for this validation exercise is the prediction accuracy within the same dataset. The endogeneity of death is an issue that has not been addressed satisfactorily in the literature, and there is a solution to the problem based on standard approaches to causal inference.

The state-of-the-art literature at the interface between experimental and behavioral economics and health economics is reviewed by identifying and discussing 10 areas of potential debate about behavioral experiments in health. By doing so, the different streams and areas of applications of the growing field of behavioral experiments in health are reviewed, by discussing which significant questions remain to be discussed, and by highlighting the rationale and the scope for the further development of behavioral experiments in health in the years to come.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. Please check back later for the full article.

The impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on health and mortality rates has been a highly studied topic in the field of economics. Many studies, using fixed-effects models, find that mortality is procyclical in many countries, such as the United States, Germany, Spain, France, Pacific-Asian nations, Mexico, and Canada. On the other hand, a small number of studies find that mortality decreases during economic expansion. Differences in the social insurance systems and labor market institutions across countries may explain some of the disparities found in the literature. Studies examining the effects of more recent recessions are less conclusive, finding mortality to be less procyclical, or even countercyclical. This new finding could be explained by changes over time in the mechanisms behind the association between business cycle conditions and mortality.

A related strand of the literature has focused on understanding the effect of economic fluctuations on infant health at birth and/or child mortality. While infant mortality is found to be procyclical in countries like the United States and Spain, the opposite is found in developing countries.

Even though the association between business cycle conditions and mortality has been extensively documented, a much stronger effort is needed to understand the mechanisms behind the relationship between business cycle conditions and health. Many studies have examined the association between macroeconomic fluctuations and smoking, drinking, weight disorders, eating habits, and physical activity, although results are rather mixed. The only well-established finding is that mental health deteriorates during economic slowdowns.

An important challenge is the fact that the comparison of the main results across studies proves to be complicated due to the variety of empirical methods and time spans used. Furthermore, estimates have been found to be sensitive to the use of different levels of geographic aggregation, model specifications, and proxies of macroeconomic fluctuations.

There are a number of challenges in the economic evaluation of medical devices (MDs). They are typically less regulated than pharmaceuticals, and the clinical evidence requirements for market authorization are generally lower. There are also specific characteristics of MDs, such as the device–user interaction (learning curve), the incremental nature of innovation, the dynamic nature of pricing, and the broader organizational impact. Therefore, a number of initiatives need to be taken in order to facilitate the economic evaluation of MDs. First, the regulatory processes for MDs need to be strengthened and more closely aligned to the needs of economic evaluation. Second, the methods of economic evaluation need to be enhanced by improving the analysis of the available clinical data, establishing high-quality clinical registries, and better recognizing MDs’ specific characteristics. Third, the market entry and diffusion of MDs need to be better managed by understanding the key influences on MD diffusion and linking diffusion with cost-effectiveness evidence through the use of performance-based risk-sharing arrangements.

Obesity is widely recognized as a chronic disease characterized by an elevated risk of adverse health conditions in association with excess body fat accumulation. Obesity prevalence reached epidemic proportions among adults in the developed world during the second half of the 20th century, and it has since become a major public health concern around the world, particularly among children and adolescents. The economics of childhood and adolescent obesity is a multi-faceted field of study that considers the numerous determinants, consequences, and interventions related to obesity in those populations.

The central economic framework for studying obesity is a life-cycle decision-making model of health investment. Health-promoting investments, such as nutritional food, health care, and physical activity, interact with genetic structure and risky health behaviors, such as unhealthy food consumption, to generate an accumulation or decumulation of excess body fat over time. Childhood and adolescence are the primary phases of physical and cognitive growth, so researchers study how obesity contributes to, and is affected by, the growth processes. The subdiscipline of behavioral economics offers an important complementary perspective on health investment decision processes, particularly for children and adolescents, because health investments and participation in risky health behaviors are not always undertaken rationally or consistently over time.

In addition to examining the proximate causes of obesity over the life cycle, economists study obesity’s economic context and resulting economic burden. For example, economists study how educational attainment, income, and labor market features, such as wage and work hours, affect childhood and adolescent obesity in a household. Once obesity has developed, its economic burden is typically measured in terms of excess health-care costs associated with increased health risks due to higher obesity prevalence, such as earlier onset of, and more severe, diabetes. Obesity among children and adolescents can lead to even higher health-care costs because of its early influence on the lifetime trajectory of health and its potential disruption of healthy development.

The formulation of effective policy responses to the obesity epidemic is informed by economic research. Economists evaluate whether steps to address childhood and adolescent obesity represent investments in health and well-being that yield private and social benefits, and they study whether existing market structures fail to appropriately motivate such investments. Potential policy interventions include taxation of, or restricting access to, obesogenic foods and other products, subsidization of educational programs about healthy foods and physical activity inside and outside of schools, ensuring health insurance coverage for obesity-related preventive and curative health-care services, and investment in the development of new treatments and medical technologies.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. Please check back later for the full article.

Education is strongly associated with better health and longer lives. However, the extent to which education causes health and longevity is widely debated. We develop a human capital framework to structure the interpretation of the empirical evidence. We then review evidence on the causal effects of education on mortality and its two most common preventable causes: smoking and obesity. We focus attention on evidence from randomized controlled trials, twin studies, and quasi-experiments. There is no convincing evidence of an effect of education on obesity, and the effects on smoking are only apparent when schooling reforms affect an individual’s track or their peer group, but not when they simply increase the duration of schooling. An effect of education on mortality exists in some contexts but not in others, and it seems to depend on (a) gender, (b) the labor market returns to education, (c) the quality of education, and (d) whether education affects the quality of individuals’ peers.

Mental health economics addresses problems that are common to all of health economics, but that occur with greater severity in this context. Several characteristics of mental health conditions—age of onset, chronicity, observability, and external effects—make them particularly economically challenging, and a range of policies have evolved to address these problems. The need for insurance—and for social insurance—to address mental health problems has grown. There is an expanding number of effective treatments available for mental health conditions, and these treatments can be relatively costly. The particular characteristics of mental health conditions exacerbate the usual problems of moral hazard, adverse selection, and agency. There is increased recognition, in both the policy and economics literatures, of the array of services and supports required to enable people with severe mental illnesses to function in society’s mainstream. The need for such non-medical services, generates economic problems of cross-system coordination and opportunism. Moreover, the impairments imposed by mental disorders have become more disruptive to the labor market because the nature of work is changing in a manner that creates special disadvantages to people with these conditions. New directions for mental health economics would address these effects.

Global trade—the movement of goods, services, people, and capital between countries—is at the center of modern globalization. Since the late 20th century trade has also become established as a critical determinant of public health. As the raison d’être of trade is to increase both wealth and the availability of goods and services, changing trade patterns will inevitably impact many of the known determinants of health, including employment, nutrition, environmental factors, social capital, and education. Trade will also impact the health sector itself, most clearly through direct trade in health-related goods and services (such as pharmaceuticals, health workers, foreign direct investment in health services, and mobile patients), but also more broadly in determining tax receipts and thus overall public expenditures. It is also the case that trade—especially rapid and widespread movement of people, animals, and goods—may facilitate the rapid and widespread spread of disease. Trade, and associated policies governing and responding to that trade, has thus become increasingly recognized as a critical driver of health issues.

The design of trade policies that reduce the potential health risks associated with freer trade while maximizing the positive impact of trade liberalization on the social determinants of health is still in its infancy. There remains a lack of sound empirical evidence demonstrating how trade liberalization links directly and indirectly to health. Even though the positive link between increased trade, poverty reduction, and economic growth is widely accepted, evidence regarding the impact of trade liberalization on the social determinants of health varies from one national context to another. Hence, adapting trade liberalization to national conditions is important in ensuring desired outcomes. Yet although evidence is necessary, it is not sufficient to ensure that health is more integrated in trade negotiations and decision-making. There is a substantive requirement for those with a health remit to engage in negotiation with those from other sectors and from other geographic locations.

Health status measurement issues arise across a wide spectrum of applications in empirical health economics research as well as in public policy, clinical, and regulatory contexts. It is fitting that economists and other researchers working in these domains devote scientific attention to the measurement of those phenomena most central to their investigations. While often accepted and used uncritically, the particular measures of health status used in empirical investigations can have sometimes subtle but nonetheless important implications for research findings and policy action. How health is characterized and measured at the individual level and how such individual-level measures are summarized to characterize the health of groups and populations are entwined considerations. Such measurement issues have become increasingly salient given the wealth of health data available from population surveys, administrative sources, and clinical records in which researchers may be confronted with competing options for how they go about characterizing and measuring health. While recent work in health economics has seen significant advances in the econometric methods used to estimate and interpret quantities like treatment effects, the literature has seen less focus on some of the central measurement issues necessarily involved in such exercises. As such, increased attention ought to be devoted to measuring and understanding health status concepts that are relevant to decision makers’ objectives as opposed to those that are merely statistically convenient.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. Please check back later for the full article.

The terms information and risk aversion play central roles in health care economics. While risk aversion is among the main reasons for the existence of health insurance, information asymmetries between the insured individual and insurance company potentially lead to moral hazard or adverse selection. This has implications for the optimal design of health insurance contracts, but whether there is indeed moral hazard or adverse selection are ultimately empirical questions. Recently, there was even a debate about whether the opposite of adverse selection prevails: advantageous selection. Private information on risk aversion might weigh out information asymmetries regarding risk type and lead to more insurance coverage of healthy individuals (instead of less insurance coverage in adverse selection).

Information and risk preferences are not only important in health insurance but more generally in health economics. For instance, they affect health behavior and, consequently, health outcomes. The degree of risk aversion, the ability to perceive risks, and the availability of information about risks partly explain why some individuals engage in unhealthy behavior while others refrain from smoking, drinking, or the like.

Information has several dimensions. Apart from information on their own health status, risk preferences, or health risks, consumer information on provider quality or health insurance supply is central in the economics of health care. Even though health care systems are necessarily highly regulated throughout the world, all systems at least allow for some market elements. These typically include the possibility of consumer choice, for instance, regarding health insurance coverage or choice of medical provider. An important question is whether consumer choice elements work in the health care sector—that is, whether consumers actually make rational or optimal decisions—and whether more information can improve decision quality or not.