IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/20348.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Does Family Health Care Use Respond to Economic Shocks? Realized and Anticipated Effects

Author

Listed:
  • Alan C. Monheit
  • Irina Grafova
  • Rizie Kumar

Abstract

Families in constrained economic circumstances resulting from economic shocks face difficult choices regarding how best to spend their diminished resources. As families strive to preserve their living standards, decisions regarding health care use and its allocation among family members may become more discretionary and complex. Using two-year panel data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2004 to 2011, we examine how the intra-family allocation of health care spending responds to realized and anticipated changes in family economic status. We focus on the share of total family health care spending allocated to children, and measure realized economic shocks based on changes in the family's income, employment, and health insurance status. We account for anticipated economic shocks by differentiating families by whether they are observed prior to, at the onset of, or during the Great Recession, or in the post-recession period. Our findings suggest that both types of economic shocks affect the share of family health care spending allocated to children, with findings more pronounced for single-mother families. We also find that realized economic shocks have a greater impact on children's spending share than the anticipated change in economic status associated with the Great Recession and its recovery.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan C. Monheit & Irina Grafova & Rizie Kumar, 2014. "How Does Family Health Care Use Respond to Economic Shocks? Realized and Anticipated Effects," NBER Working Papers 20348, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20348
    Note: EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20348.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gary S. Becker, 1981. "A Treatise on the Family," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number beck81-1, August.
    2. Schaller, Jessamyn & Stevens, Ann Huff, 2015. "Short-run effects of job loss on health conditions, health insurance, and health care utilization," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 190-203.
    3. Papke, Leslie E. & Wooldridge, Jeffrey M., 2008. "Panel data methods for fractional response variables with an application to test pass rates," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 145(1-2), pages 121-133, July.
    4. Michael D. Hurd & Susann Rohwedder, 2010. "Effects of the Financial Crisis and Great Recession on American Households," NBER Working Papers 16407, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Dickie, Mark & Messman, Victoria L., 2004. "Parental altruism and the value of avoiding acute illness: are kids worth more than parents?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 48(3), pages 1146-1174, November.
    6. John Mullahy, 2010. "Multivariate Fractional Regression Estimation of Econometric Share Models," NBER Working Papers 16354, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Michael D. Hurd & Susann Rohwedder, 2010. "Effects of the Financial Crisis and Great Recession on American Households," NBER Working Papers 16407, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Janneke Pieters & Samantha Rawlings, 2020. "Parental unemployment and child health in China," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 207-237, March.
    2. Irina B. Grafova & Alan C. Monheit & Rizie Kumar, 2019. "How Do Economic Shocks Affect Family Health Care Spending Burdens?," NBER Working Papers 26443, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alan C. Monheit & Irina B. Grafova & Rizie Kumar, 2020. "How does family health care use respond to economic shocks? realized and anticipated effects," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 307-334, June.
    2. Irina B. Grafova & Alan C. Monheit & Rizie Kumar, 2020. "How do changes in income, employment and health insurance affect family mental health spending?," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 239-263, March.
    3. Darko, Francis Addeah & Eales, James S., 2013. "Meat Demand in the US During and After the Great Recession," 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. 150146, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    4. Jianhong Mu & Bruce McCarl & Anne Wein, 2013. "Adaptation to climate change: changes in farmland use and stocking rate in the U.S," Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer, vol. 18(6), pages 713-730, August.
    5. Harald Oberhofer & Michael Pfaffermayr, 2014. "Two-Part Models for Fractional Responses Defined as Ratios of Integers," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 2(3), pages 1-22, September.
    6. Erdal Tekin & Chandler McClellan & Karen Jean Minyard, 2013. "Health and Health Behaviors during the Worst of Times," NBER Working Papers 19234, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Christelis, Dimitris & Georgarakos, Dimitris & Jappelli, Tullio, 2015. "Wealth shocks, unemployment shocks and consumption in the wake of the Great Recession," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 21-41.
    8. Hélène Couprie & Elisabeth Cudeville & Catherine Sofer, 2020. "Efficiency versus gender roles and stereotypes: an experiment in domestic production," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(1), pages 181-211, March.
    9. Brown, Martin, 2013. "The transmission of banking crises to households : lessons from the 2008-2011 crises in the ECA region," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6528, The World Bank.
    10. Kyle F Herkenhoff, 2019. "The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Unemployment," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 86(6), pages 2605-2642.
    11. Marco Guerrazzi, 2015. "Animal spirits, investment and unemployment: An old Keynesian view of the Great Recession," Economia, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics], vol. 16(3), pages 343-358.
    12. Beachy, Ben, 2012. "A Financial Crisis Manual Causes, Consequences, and Lessons of the Financial Crisis," Working Papers 179105, Tufts University, Global Development and Environment Institute.
    13. Dickie, Mark & Gerking, Shelby, 2007. "Altruism and environmental risks to health of parents and their children," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 53(3), pages 323-341, May.
    14. Li, Ji Feng & Wang, Xin & Zhang, Ya Xiong & Kou, Qin, 2014. "The economic impact of carbon pricing with regulated electricity prices in China ‐ An application of a CGE approach," Conference papers 332548, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    15. Claire Greene & Shaun O'Brien & Scott Schuh, 2017. "U. S. consumer cash use, 2012 and 2015: an introduction to the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice," Research Data Report 17-6, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    16. Ben Beachy, 2012. "A Financial Crisis Manual Causes, Consequences, and Lessons of the Financial Crisis," GDAE Working Papers 12-06, GDAE, Tufts University.
    17. Danilo Delpini & Stefano Battiston & Guido Caldarelli & Massimo Riccaboni, 2018. "The Network of U.S. Mutual Fund Investments: Diversification, Similarity and Fragility throughout the Global Financial Crisis," Papers 1801.02205, arXiv.org.
    18. Thomas F. Crossley & Joachim K. Winter, 2014. "Asking Households about Expenditures: What Have We Learned?," NBER Chapters, in: Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures, pages 23-50, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Scott Schuh, 2017. "Measuring consumer expenditures with payment diaries," Working Papers 17-2, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    20. Miaoqing Yang & Eugenio Zucchelli, 2018. "The impact of public smoking bans on well‐being externalities: Evidence from a policy experiment," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 65(3), pages 224-247, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I13 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Insurance, Public and Private
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:20348. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.