Pay less, consume more? The price elasticity of home care for the disabled elderly in France
利用法国某省居家照护补贴项目的行政数据，估计失能老人对服务价格的需求弹性约为-0.4，为补贴方案中的共付额设计提供参考。
Little is known about the price sensitivity of demand for home care of the disabled elderly. We partially fill this knowledge gap by using administrative data on the beneficiaries of the main French home care subsidy program in a department and exploiting interindividual variation in provider prices. We address the potential endogeneity of prices by taking advantage of the unequal spatial coverage of providers and instrumenting price by the number of municipalities served by a provider. We estimate a price elasticity of around -0.4 that is significantly different from both 0 and -1. This less than proportionate response of consumption to price has implications for the efficiency and redistributive impact of variation in the level of copayments in home care subsidy schemes.