Evaluating Long-Term-Care Policy Options, Taking the Family Seriously*
构建了一个考虑家庭内部讨价还价的动态非合作模型，评估美国长期护理政策选项，发现非收入审查的家庭照料补贴能显著减少对医疗补助的依赖，且照料者劳动供给下降导致的税收损失较小。
We propose a dynamic non-cooperative framework for long-term-care (LTC) decisions of families and use it to evaluate LTC policy options for the U.S. We firs document the importance of informal caregiving and economic determinants of care arrangements. We then build a heterogeneous-agents model with imperfectly-altruistic overlapping generations to account for the patterns we find A key innovation is the availability of informal care (IC), which is determined through intra-family bargaining. This opens up a new margin in response to policy and allows for informal insurance through home-production of care. Our calibrated model captures the observed care arrangements well. We study the implications of non-means-tested IC and formal care (FC) subsidies as well as changes to means-tested Medicaid. We fin that IC responds strongly to these policies. An IC subsidy substantially reduces reliance on Medicaid, while the reduction of tax revenues due to lower labour supply by caregivers is modest. There are large welfare gains from a combination of IC and FC subsidies, even when combined with a reduction of the Medicaid program.