题目：Imperfectly-Tradable Health and the Provision of Employment-based Health Insurance

时间：2017年5月10日 星期三 12:00 – 13:30

地点：明德主楼714

报告人：冯志刚

摘要： We study the implications of imperfectly-tradable health on the choices by firms of employment based health insurance (EHI) and wages to offer, and the decisions by workers of whether to (i) accept the EHI and wage, (ii) just accept the wage, or (iii) reject the offer. Workers derive utility from consumption and good health; and health insurance compensates a share of medical spending costs expended to partially offset negative health shocks to a worker’s stock of health. A worker is distinguished by his observable productivity and his unobservable and heterogeneous health risk. In equilibrium, higher skill workers match with more productive firms and receive higher wages. Since good health is a normal good and imperfectly tradable, less skilled workers with small enough health risks will shift the optimal consumption of total spending away from health by declining EHI. This magnifies the adverse selection problem among low productive firms who hire less skill workers. The imperfect tradability of good health driving this rejection resolves a paradox that low productivity firms incur limited costs from offering EHI despite the adverse selection, as most workers decline EHI despite the signicant cost subsidy implicit in the health care offered. We show that more productive firms offer more generous EHI and take-up ratios are higher among their workers. Our model reconciles a host of empirical regularities in the SIPP dataset.

报告人简介：冯志刚，University of Nebraska助理教授，毕业于迈阿密大学，研究方向为宏观经济理论、财政学、医疗保障等，论文发表于International Economic Review, Review of Economic Dynamics, Quantitative Economics等顶级期刊。