NBER Publications by Anna Lindgren

Several past studies have found health risk to be negatively correlated with the probability of voluntary health insurance. This is contrary to what one would expect from standard textbook models of adverse selection and moral hazard. The two most common explanations to the counter-intuitive result are either (1) that risk-aversion is correlated with health — i.e. that healthier individuals are also more risk-averse — or (2) that insurers are able to discriminate among customers based on observable health-risk characteristics. We revisited these arguments, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Self-assessed health served as an indicator of risk: better health, lower risk. We did, indeed, observe a negative correlation between risk and insurance but ...

We analysed the relative importance of individual versus institutional factors in explaining variations in the utilisation of physician services among the 50+ in ten European countries. The importance of the latter was investigated, distinguishing between organisational (explicit) and cultural (implicit) institutional factors, by analysing the influence of supply side factors, such as physician density and physician reimbursement, and demand side factors, such as co-payment and gate-keeping, while controlling for a number of individual characteristics, using cross-national individual-level data from SHARE. Individual differences in health status accounted for about 50 percent of the between-country variation in physician visits, while the organisational and cultural factors considered each...