Health and Inequality
In this research I am primarily interested in understanding three different aspects of health – 1) heterogeneity within a population 2) understanding how inequalities in health and mortality translate into inequality in individual well-being across racial groups and 3) dynamic evolution of health over the life-cycle. Some specific research projects in these directions are as follows:
Working paper
Miller, R., Chin, S., & Sedai, A.K. The Welfare Cost of Late-life Depression
We quantify the welfare cost of depression among older Americans by estimating a panel VAR model of mental and physical health, labor supply, and consumption using data from the Health and Retirement Study. We use the estimated model and age sixty joint distribution of outcomes to simulate life-cycle paths with and without prevalence of depressive symptoms after age sixty. We estimate that the prevalence of late-life depression costs an average of between 0.85 and 2.1 years in quality-adjusted life expectancy per person. Moreover, depression may result in an average loss of labor supply of up to 1.1 months and lifetime consumption of up to 16,000 US dollars. Combining into a single compensating variation welfare metric, we estimate a bound on the average welfare cost of depression of 8-15% of annual consumption after age sixty. On aggregate, this amounts to roughly 180-360 billion US dollars annually. We also project that while the average welfare cost of late-life depression is declining slightly over birth cohorts, the welfare burden is becoming significantly more unequal.
Manuscript in preparation
Chin, S., & Miller, R. Beyond Income: Health, Wealth, and Racial Welfare Gaps Among Older Americans
We estimate racial disparities in well-being among the older U.S. population using an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, and mortality. We find large racial disparities in expected welfare later in life that have increased over time. Moreover, disparity measures based on cross-sectional income or consumption substantially underestimate the level and growth in the racial welfare gap by ignoring growing disparities in expected elderly health and mortality. Our decomposition results suggest that roughly 10-12% of the consumption and labor supply gradient at age sixty could be closed by eliminating elderly health differences.