We examine the effects of patient cost-sharing on adolescents' healthcare utilization and out-of-pocket medical expenditures by exploiting the healthcare reform in South Korea that lowered the coinsurance rate for inpatient care from 20% to 5% for children under 16. We apply a...

We investigate the association between age and medical spending in the U.S. using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We estimate a partially linear seminonparametric model and construct "pure" life-cycle profiles of health spending simultaneously controlling for time effects...

In this paper we construct life-cycle profiles of U.S. health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We separate pure age effects on health expenditure from time effects (i.e. productivity effects, business cycle effects, etc.) and cohort effects (i.e. initial...

The cost of children is a critical parameter used in determining many economic policies. For instance, correctly setting the tax deduction for families with children requires assessing the true household cost of children. Evaluating child poverty at the individual level requires making a clear...

We examine linkages between aggregate household income, distribution of that income, and aggregate cross-country expenditure patterns. We are able to decompose income effects into international income dispersion effects (from variations in average income) and national income dispersion (income...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

In this paper we examine the link between wage inequality and consumption inequality using a life cycle model that incorporates household consumption and family labor supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions based on approximations for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings...

This paper documents the integration of microsimulation tools for direct taxation, indirect taxation, and social benefits in the context of the European tax and benefit simulator, EUROMOD. Integration has been developed parallely for the two countries, Belgium and Germany. The paper at hand...

On what and to what extent private households in Germany spend money varies significantly depending on employment status, income, and age. As this study based on the most current official sample survey of income and expenditure from 2013 shows, unemployed households on average spend over half of...

The Hamilton method for estimating CPI bias is simple, intuitive, and has been widely adopted. We show that the method confiates CPI bias with variation in cost-of-living across income levels. Assuming a single price index across the income distribution is inconsistent with the downward sloping...