Financial stringencies are leading many countries to increase reliance on individual and market-based insurance systems, and to reduce the range of promises provided by national social insurance schemes. Chile is in the forefront of this global trend, having in the 1980's replaced traditional (and bankrupt) pay-as-you-go programs with schemes having strong insurance and prefunded components. Therefore, Chile represents an ideal setting for examining how health, retirement and related behaviors respond to systematic reforms of national insurance systems. After two decades of experience with reforms in the pension and health insurance sectors, there is now a unique opportunity to explore a range of outcomes of central importance to an aging world. The proposed project has two goals: (1) to generate a valuable new microeconomic longitudinal and multilinked dataset on earnings, health, retirement and pension and health insurance plan choices in Chile; and (2) to undertake several analyses of the impact of health and pension privatization in Chile on health and work patterns as well as saving for old-age. This research will illuminate key lessons for health and pension policy in countries such as the United States where the mix of public and private insurance is likely to change in the near future. The major specific aims are: (1) To produce a longitudinal microeconomic national household panel public use dataset - the first for Chile -- linked to administrative records from social security and health insurance plans, as well as a rich array of other data; (2) To investigate the determinants of choices among health and pension plans and the impact of such choices on lifecycle health, labor supply, retirement and mortality outcomes; (3) To investigate the impact of health, pension and unemployment insurance policies on the distribution of benefits and costs across the population and between generations, in part through affecting, for example, the pricing of private insurance; (4) To evaluate how inferences obtained from reduced-form approaches used to estimate the impact of policy changes compare with inferences based on more fully specified dynamic behavioral models.
| Behrman, Jere R; Mitchell, Olivia S; Soo, Cindy K et al. (2012) How Financial Literacy Affects Household Wealth Accumulation. Am Econ Rev 102:300-304 |
| Behrman, Jere R; Behrman, Julia A; Perez, Nykia M (2011) Out of sync? Demographic and other social science research on health conditions in developing countries. Demogr Res 24:45-78 |
| Behrman, Jere R; Behrman, Julia A; Perez, Nykia M (2009) On what diseases and health conditions should new economic research on health and development focus? Health Econ 18 Suppl 1:S109-28 |
