IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/hlthec/v32y2023i10p2353-2371.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rural pensions, intra‐household bargaining, and elderly medical expenditure in China

Author

Listed:
  • Zeyuan Chen
  • Albert Park

Abstract

China's rural elderly spend less on medical expenditures as they age despite declining health, raising welfare concerns. This paper investigates the role of intrahousehold bargaining power on health expenditures of the elderly by evaluating the impact of cash transfers from a new social pension program. The program provided windfall payments to those above age 60, making it possible to employ a regression discontinuity design based on age of eligibility to estimate causal effects. Using data from the 2011 and 2013 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we find that receiving pension payments increases both the utilization of outpatient care and outpatient expenditures by the elderly who experienced illness. This result is robust to controlling for total household expenditures per capita, ruling out income effects as the main channel. Consistent with pensions increasing elderly bargaining power, we find that pensions significantly increase medical expenditures only for those elderly who co‐reside with children or grandchildren but have no effect on those who live independently.

Suggested Citation

  • Zeyuan Chen & Albert Park, 2023. "Rural pensions, intra‐household bargaining, and elderly medical expenditure in China," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(10), pages 2353-2371, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:32:y:2023:i:10:p:2353-2371
    DOI: 10.1002/hec.4725
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4725
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/hec.4725?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:32:y:2023:i:10:p:2353-2371. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/5749 .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.