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Author Info

  • James Banks
  • Thomas Crossley
  • Simo Goshev

Abstract

The paper investigates whether self-assessed health status (SAH) contains information about future mortality and morbidity, beyond the information that is contained in standard "observable" characteristics of individuals (including pre-existing diagnosed medical conditions). Using a ten-year span of the Canadian National Population Health Survey, we find that SAH does contain private information for future mortality and morbidity. Moreover, we find some evidence that the extra information in SAH is greater at older ages. Many developed countries are experiencing a major shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension arrangements. One consequence of this shift is an effective delay in the age at which workers commit to an annuity. Our results therefore suggest that adverse selection problems in annuity markets could be more severe at older ages, and therefore, that the DB to DC shift may expose workers to greater longevity risk. This is an aspect of the DB to DC shift that has received little attention.

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File URL: http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/sedap/p/sedap219.pdf
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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by McMaster University in its series Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers with number 219.

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Length: 45 pages
Date of creation: Aug 2007
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:mcm:sedapp:219

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Related research

Keywords: Self-Assessed Health; Annuities; Mortality; Morbidity;

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Cited by:
  1. Wuppermann, Amelie Catherine, 2011. "Empirical Essays in Health and Education Economics," Munich Dissertations in Economics 13187, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
  2. Furmanov, Kirill & Chernysheva, Irina, 2012. "Health and job search in Russia," Applied Econometrics, Publishing House "SINERGIA PRESS", vol. 26(2), pages 62-91.

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