This paper sheds light on the causal relationship between education and health outcomes. It combines three surveys (SHARE, HRS and ELSA) that include nationally representative samples of people aged 50 and over from thirteen OECD countries. It uses variation in the timing of educational reforms...

About one-third of elderly Americans age 65 and older supplements their Medicare health insurance in a private insurance market known as the ÒMedigapÓ market. Prices for Medigap policies vary widely, despite the fact that regulations enacted in 1992 standardized all Medigap policies, thereby...

As health care costs continue to rise, medical expenses have become an increasingly important contributor to financial risk. Economic theory suggests that when background risk rises, individuals will reduce their exposure to other risks. This paper presents a test of this theory by examining the...

The authors study labor supply of elderly couples by means of a collective model. The model allows individuals to enjoy leisure more (or less) in company of their spouse (complementarity/ externalities in leisure). Preferences and the intra-household bargaining process are identified by using...

The authors use a unique cross-country data set covering nearly 22,000 elderly individuals (age 50+) from 10 European Countries. Cross-country differences in the prevalence of obesity in older Europeans are substantial and exceed sociodemographic differentials in obesity. Obesity is strongly...

A positive relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and health, the so-called "health-wealth gradient", is repeatedly found in most industrialized countries with similar levels of health care technology and economic welfare. This study analyzes causality from health to wealth (health...

In this paper the authors examine the scope of cross-country variation in institutions related to social insurance. Building on the variation they find they assess the value of new micro data that is comparable across countries to help identify key parameters of individual behavior. They present...

The authors study the effect of attrition and other forms of non-response on the representativity over time of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) sample born 1931-1941; the sample was initially drawn in 1992. Although some baseline characteristics of respondents do appear correlated with...

The authors formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. They explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which...

While the fraction of obese people is not as large in Europe as in the United States, obesity is becoming an important issue in Europe as well. Using comparable data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Health and Retirement Study in the U.S. (HRS), this...