This paper uses the abrupt changes in health insurance coverage at age 65 arising from the Medicare program eligibility rules to evaluate the impact of insurance status on treatment intensity and health outcomes. Drawing from several million hospital discharge records for the State of...

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...

This research addresses the effect of prescription drug insurance coverage on the use and expenditures for prescription medications in the elderly.

Self-reported work disability is analyzed in the US and The Netherlands. The raw data show that Dutch respondents much more often report that they have a work limiting health problem than respondents in the US. The difference remains when controlling for demographic characteristics and observed...

The authors use the increases in health insurance coverage at age 65 generated by the rules of the Medicare program to evaluate the effects of health insurance coverage on health related behaviors and outcomes. The rise in overall coverage at age 65 is accompanied by a narrowing of disparities...

Self-reported work disability is analyzed in the US, the UK and the Netherlands. Different wordings of the questions lead to different work disability rates. But even if identical questions are asked, crosscountry differences remain substantial. Respondent evaluations of work limitations of...

This paper investigates the role of pain in determining self-reported work disability in the U.S., the U.K. and The Netherlands. Even if identical questions are asked, cross-country differences in reported work disability remain substantial. In the U.S. and the Netherlands, respondent...

This paper investigates the role of pain in affecting self-reported work disability and employment of elderly workers in the US. The authors investigate pain and its relationship to work disability and work in a dynamic panel data model, using six biennial waves from the Health and Retirement...

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...