IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29898.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Health Care Expenditure and Farm Income Loss: Evidence from Natural Disasters

Author

Listed:
  • Hung-Hao Chang
  • Chad Meyerhoefer

Abstract

Farmers have higher rates of disability and illness than the general population and more volatile incomes due to frequent crop and livestock losses from extreme weather events. This raises concerns that sudden, weather-related drops in farm income could reduce access to health care for an already vulnerable population. We estimate the sensitivity of health care use to the loss in farm income brought about by natural disasters in Taiwan. To account for endogenous exposure to disaster risks, we estimate an instrumental variables model and find that farm income elasticities of demand for outpatient care and prescriptions range from 0.11 to 0.32. Reductions in health care use may be due, in part, to changes in time allocations within farm households.

Suggested Citation

  • Hung-Hao Chang & Chad Meyerhoefer, 2022. "Health Care Expenditure and Farm Income Loss: Evidence from Natural Disasters," NBER Working Papers 29898, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29898
    Note: DEV EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29898.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • Q12 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Micro Analysis of Farm Firms, Farm Households, and Farm Input Markets

    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:29898. 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: 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.