Health Care Quality and Economic Inequality
37 Pages Posted: 23 Sep 2004
Date Written: August 2004
Abstract
We argue that health care quality has an important impact on economic inequality and on saving behavior. We exploit district-wide variability in health care quality provided by the Italian universal public health system to identify the effect of quality on income inequality, health inequality and precautionary saving. We find that in lower quality districts there is greater income and health dispersion and higher precautionary saving. The analysis carries important insights for the ongoing debate about the validity of the life-cycle model and interesting policy implications for the design of health care systems.
Keywords: Income inequality, precautionary saving, health care
JEL Classification: D31, D91
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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