Determinants of Health Care Decisions: Insurance, Utilization, and Expenditures
研究了保险、医疗利用和支出三者间的内生关系，使用半参数方法分析2005年医疗支出面板调查数据，发现保险使支出增加48%，远低于参数方法的结果。
This paper studies three interrelated health care decisions: insurance, utilization, and expenditures. The model treats insurance as an endogenous variable with respect to both utilization and expenditures, addresses potential selection issues, and takes into account that the decisions to use health care and the level of treatment are determined by different decision makers. We employ semiparametric methods to avoid making distributional assumptions. Using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 2005 data, the semiparametric approach predicts insurance to increase the level of expenditures by 48%, a number in accord with an important experimental study and less than half that obtained using parametric methods. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.