Seminario de Investigación "More to Live for: Health Investment Responses to Expected Retirement Wealth in Chile"
El seminario destinado a docentes, investigadores, becarios y estudiantes interesados en la temática, se realizará el viernes 21 de octubre a las 12:30 horas por videoconferencia, con la presentación a cargo de Nieves Valdés (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez).
Nieves Valdés es Investigadora Asociada en la Escuela de Negocios de la Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. Tiene un PhD en Economía por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid y es Licenciada en Economía por la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Sus investigaciones se centran en temas de Microeconomía Aplicada, Economía de la Salud, Evaluación de Políticas y Economía de la Educación y sus trabajos han sido publicados en revistas académicas como International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Preventive Medicine, International Journal of Health Economics and Management, BMJ Open, Journal of Population Economics y Health Economics.
Abstract: A poorly understood but important way that economic conditions influence health is through the incentives that they create for health investments. In this paper, we study how individuals’ current health investments respond to changes in expected future wealth, focusing on Chile’s 1981 public pension reform (shifting from a defined benefit to a defined contribution system). We compile detailed administrative pension data linked to a rich household panel survey, and we then exploit discrete breaks in the reform’s impact on expected pension wealth across cohorts of Chileans using a fuzzy regression kink (RK) design to estimate how health investments (use of preventive screenings for major chronic diseases whose management is closely related to longevity, as well as healthy lifestyle behaviors) respond to changes in expected pension wealth. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that greater expected pension wealth increases the use of preventive medical care (and to a lesser extent, promotes more costly healthy lifestyle behavior change), leading to measurable increases in chronic disease diagnoses in the Chilean population. More generally, our results provide new empirical evidence of forward-looking behavior consistent with the life-cycle (Modigliani and Brumberg 1954) and permanent income (Friedman 1957) hypotheses.
Autores: Grant Miller (Stanford Medical School & NBER), Nieves Valdés (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez) y Marcos Vera-Hernández (University College London & Institute of Fiscal Studies)
Organizan: Departamento de Economía, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Revista Económica
Contacto: iie@econo.unlp.edu.ar
