Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Is Health Care a Necessity or a Luxury? New Evidence from a Panel of U.S. State-Level Data

Contents:

Author Info

  • Donald G. Freeman

    () (Department of Economics and International Business, Sam Houston State University)

Registered author(s):

    Abstract

    This paper estimates the income elasticity of health care expenditures using annual data on health spending by state in the U.S. from 1966-2009. Panel stationarity tests incorporating structural breaks in the levels and trends in Health Care Expenditures and Disposable Personal Income yield inconsistent results, with stationarity rejected for HCE but not for DPI. Regression results using levels estimation robust to orders of integration differed considerably depending on time period, and the cross-state variation in elasticity estimates was quite large. Results of the first difference models provide more consistent estimates across time periods, whether expressed as averages of individual state estimates or as pooled time series. Income elasticities for the full sample fall in the range 0.21-0.22, below that of recent research.

    Download Info

    If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
    File URL: http://www.shsu.edu/%7Etcq001/paper_files/wp12-03_paper.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by Sam Houston State University, Department of Economics and International Business in its series Working Papers with number 1203.

    as in new window
    Length:
    Date of creation: Aug 2012
    Date of revision:
    Handle: RePEc:shs:wpaper:1203

    Contact details of provider:
    Postal: P O Box 2118, Huntsville, TX 77341-2118
    Fax: 936-294-3612
    Web page: http://www.shsu.edu/~eco_www/
    More information through EDIRC

    Related research

    Keywords:

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    References

    References listed on IDEAS
    Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
    as in new window
    1. Lant Pritchett & Lawrence H. Summers, 1996. "Wealthier is Healthier," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 31(4), pages 841-868.
    2. M. Hashem Pesaran, 2006. "Estimation and Inference in Large Heterogeneous Panels with a Multifactor Error Structure," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(4), pages 967-1012, 07.
    3. F. Moscone & E. Tosetti, 2010. "Health expenditure and income in the United States," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(12), pages 1385-1403, December.
    4. Holly, Sean & Pesaran, M. Hashem & Yamagata, Takashi, 2006. "A Spatio-Temporal Model of House Prices in the US," IZA Discussion Papers 2338, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    5. McCoskey, Suzanne K. & Selden, Thomas M., 1998. "Health care expenditures and GDP: panel data unit root test results," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 369-376, June.
    6. Carrion-i-Silvestre, Josep Lluis, 2005. "Health care expenditure and GDP: Are they broken stationary?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(5), pages 839-854, September.
    7. Kaddour Hadri, 2000. "Testing for stationarity in heterogeneous panel data," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 3(2), pages 148-161.
    8. Kwiatkowski, Denis & Phillips, Peter C. B. & Schmidt, Peter & Shin, Yongcheol, 1992. "Testing the null hypothesis of stationarity against the alternative of a unit root : How sure are we that economic time series have a unit root?," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 54(1-3), pages 159-178.
    9. Badi H. Baltagi & Francesco Moscone, 2009. "Health Care Expenditure and Income in the OECD Reconsidered: Evidence from Panel Data," Discussion Papers in Economics 09/5, Department of Economics, University of Leicester.
    10. Zivot, Eric & Andrews, Donald W K, 1992. "Further Evidence on the Great Crash, the Oil-Price Shock, and the Unit-Root Hypothesis," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 10(3), pages 251-70, July.
    11. Donald Freeman, 2003. "Is health care a necessity or a luxury? Pooled estimates of income elasticity from US state-level data," Applied Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 35(5), pages 495-502.
    12. Josep Lluis Carrion Silvestre & Tomas del Barrio Castro & Enrique Lopez Bazo, 2003. "Breaking the panels. An application to the GDP per capita," Working Papers in Economics 97, Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia.
    13. M. Hashem Pesaran & Yongcheol Shin & Richard J. Smith, 2001. "Bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 16(3), pages 289-326.
    14. Perron, Pierre, 1989. "The Great Crash, the Oil Price Shock, and the Unit Root Hypothesis," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(6), pages 1361-1401, November.
    15. Im, Kyung So & Pesaran, M. Hashem & Shin, Yongcheol, 2003. "Testing for unit roots in heterogeneous panels," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 115(1), pages 53-74, July.
    16. MacKinnon, James G, 1994. "Approximate Asymptotic Distribution Functions for Unit-Root and Cointegration Tests," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 12(2), pages 167-76, April.
    17. Maddala, G S & Wu, Shaowen, 1999. " A Comparative Study of Unit Root Tests with Panel Data and a New Simple Test," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 61(0), pages 631-52, Special I.
    18. Hansen, Paul & King, Alan, 1996. "The determinants of health care expenditure: A cointegration approach," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 127-137, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Lists

    This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:shs:wpaper:1203

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Troy Quast).

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

    If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.