Joint Lifetime Financial, Work, and Health Decisions: Thrifty and Healthy Enough for the Long Run?

Détails

ID Serval
serval:BIB_3C59BC956422
Type
Rapport: document publié par une institution, habituellement élément d'une série.
Sous-type
Working paper: document de travail dans lequel l'auteur présente les résultats de ses travaux de recherche. Les working papers ont pour but de stimuler les discussions scientifiques avec les milieux intéressés et servent de base pour la publication d'articles dans des revues spécialisées.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Titre
Joint Lifetime Financial, Work, and Health Decisions: Thrifty and Healthy Enough for the Long Run?
Auteur⸱e⸱s
Mesquida Y., St-Amour P.
Détails de l'institution
HEC Lausanne
Date de publication
2016
Langue
anglais
Résumé
US individuals are separately admonished for not being healthy enough, and for insufficient savings in both financial and pension assets. However, characterizing joint health, and assets sufficiency becomes more challenging when exposure to death, and sickness risks can be altered through forward-looking health spending and leisure decisions made by agents. We consider such a framework to reassess joint adequacy in health capital, financial and pension wealth. Our benchmark is flexible enough to admit either healthy-and-thrifty, or live-fast-die-young optimal strategies. Nevertheless, observed choices are found to be inconsistent with rational planning. Individuals in the data are not healthy enough, and consequently face a shorter life horizon than expected. Moreover, full insurance, and age-increasing wages would optimally point to more medical expenditures and less leisure to maintain health than currently observed. As a consequence, observed post-retirement income is too low, and financial wealth is depleted too rapidly, leading to a sharp drop in consumption after 65 that is inconsistent with optimizing behavior. Relaxing assumptions on complete health insurance and pension regimes only partially alleviates these discrepancies.
Mots-clé
Savings Adequacy, Defined Benefits and Contributions Plans, Consumption, Leisure, Health Expenditures, Mortality and Morbidity Risks
Création de la notice
19/10/2017 11:46
Dernière modification de la notice
21/08/2019 6:13
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