Claire Finn (School of Economics & Geary Institute, University College Dublin) Colm Harmon (School of Economics, Geary Institute & IZA Bonn, University College Dublin)
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The Irish health care system offers a tax financed, universal entitlement to public care at a nominal user fee, nonetheless 50% of the Irish population purchase private health insurance. This paper empirically models the propensity to insure as a function of individual and household characteristics using panel data analysis and compares three alternate approaches; a static, chamberlain-mundlak and dynamic specification. Using panel data from 1994 to 2000, we consider whether propensity to insure is in fact a function of heterogeneity or of state dependence. A range of individual and household characteristics is shown to influence propensity to insure. Overall the positive effect of education and income and the negative effect of poor heath status remain robust across three specifications. In moving toward a dynamic specification, we show that persistence is a highly significant determinant of demand for private health insurance and also that it reduces the size of the coefficients on the regressors. The latter point highlights that while education, income and, to a lesser extent, health status have very large effects on probability of insuring, these effects are overestimated where no attempt is made to control for unobserved heterogeneity or state dependence.
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Paper provided by Geary Institute, University College Dublin in its series Working Papers with number
200612.
Find related papers by JEL classification: G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
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.:
Wiji Arulampalam & Alison Booth & Mark P. Taylor, 1998.
"Unemployment Persistence,"
ILR working papers
019, Institute for Labour Research.
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