Essays in Economics of Social Security Disability Insurance and Health

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I analyze the importance of access to Medicare in analysis of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Specifically, the first chapter addresses the following questions: (1) How does access to Medicare via SSDI enrollment affect the incentive to leave employment and to apply for SSDI? (2) What are the welfare effects of access to Medicare via SSDI? (3) How will SSDI policy reforms that change access to Medicare affect labor supply, welfare, and the financial stability of SSDI? To answer these questions, I specify a life-cycle model of labor supply, consumption, and SSDI application decisions. The model incorporates a stochastic process for out-of-pocket medical expenditure as well as the institutional features of Medicare. I estimate the model using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Counterfactual simulations indicate that availability of Medicare coverage via SSDI enrollment reduces the employment rate of men at ages 23 to 62 by 0.7 percentage points (from 87.7% to 87.0%). Medicare coverage via SSDI improves social welfare even after accounting for the higher taxes required to finance the additional enrollees who are induced to apply. Finally, I find that increasing the frequency of reassessment for SSDI enrollees is a relatively efficient way to reduce the SSDI budget deficit without sacrificing much of social welfare, compared to other alternatives such as making SSDI screening criteria more stringent.In the second chapter, we study long-term health effects of malaria exposure around birth using evidence from colonial Taiwan. In the early 20th century, the Japanese colonial government initiated an island-wide malaria eradication campaign in Taiwan, resulting in not only a rapid decline in malaria across time but also elimination of disparity across regions. Exploiting variations in malaria deaths caused by the campaign, we estimate causal effects of malaria exposure around birth on the health of elderly born in the colonial period. To mitigate potential biases caused by measurement errors and omitted confounders, we employ climatic factors to instrument for malaria deaths. Our findings suggest that people who were exposed to a high malaria risk around birth tend to have a higher likelihood of cardiovascular diseases and worse cognitive functions at old age. In the third chapter, we investigate whether the effects of parents’ in utero malnutrition extend to the second generation (their children). We explore whether the second generation’s schooling is negatively impacted by their parents’ malnutrition in utero, using the China Famine as a natural experiment. We find that, the impact of mother’s in utero malnutrition due to the China Famine reduced second generation male and female entrance into junior secondary school by about 5-7 percentage points. We measure famine severity with provincial excess death rates instrumented by measures of adverse climate conditions, which corrects for possible biases induced by measurement errors and omitted variables. Our findings indicate the existence of an important second-generation multiplier of policies that support the nutrition of pregnant women and infants in any country where nutritional deficiencies remain today.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Seonghoon

Contributors dc:contributor

• Blau, David

• Economics
• Public Health
• Social Security Disability Insurance
• Barker hypothesis
• Medicare
• health insurance
• famine
• malaria

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1365696633

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1365696633