Household Preferences for Employer-Provided Health Insurance: An Empirical Discrete Games Approach
2011/11/08
研討會日期 : 2011-11-08
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Meng-Chi Tang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Meng-Chi Tang received his Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University in 2009. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Economics at National Chung Cheng University. His research field is in empirical contract theory and empirical industrial organization.
演講摘要 : This paper examines how a spouse's access to employer-provided health insurance (EPHI) affects preferences to acquire the same access at both the individual and household level. Regarding EPHI access and employment joint decision process as a cooperative, simultaneous game between husband and wife, this study investigates this joint decision using panel data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Our empirical estimation controls for unobserved fixed effects, and allows the EPHI access of both husband and wife to be endogenous. Empirical results show that spousal access to EPHI is negatively related to own EPHI access, indicating that household members as a unit prefer single EPHI access to dual access. Using family income share as a proxy for individual indirect utility, this study shows that the husband's incremental disutility of having spousal EPHI access is greater than that of the wife. The empirical discrete games approach provides a new perspective on how married couples make joint EPHI access decisions.
