Income and Health Care Consumption: Evidence From Mortgage Payment Shocks
利用大衰退期间浮动利率抵押贷款借款人意外减少还款额带来的收入增加，研究发现这些地区医疗支出和就医次数上升，为收入冲击如何影响家庭医疗消费提供了保守估计。
During the Great Recession, monetary stimulus had asymmetric impacts on mortgages with different interest rate structures, leading to a significant and unexpected reduction in mortgage payments for adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) borrowers, which in turn increased their disposable income. Leveraging this quasi-experimental setup, our analysis reveals that healthcare expenditures and medical service utilization increased in counties with a higher prevalence of ARMs. The heterogeneity between ARM and fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) borrowers, combined with the more pronounced economic decline observed in counties densely populated with ARMs, allows our study to provide conservative lower bound estimates of the effects of income shocks on household healthcare consumption.