TY - JOUR AU - Garber,Alan M. AU - MaCurdy,Thomas E. TI - Predicting Nursing Home Utilization Among the High-Risk Elderly JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 2843 PY - 1989 Y2 - February 1989 DO - 10.3386/w2843 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2843 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2843.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Alan M. Garber Provost Harvard University Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-5100 Fax: 617/495-8550 E-Mail: alan_garber@harvard.edu Thomas E. MaCurdy Department of Economics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6072 Tel: 650/723-3983 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: tmac@leland.stanford.edu M1 - published as Alan M. Garber, Thomas E. MaCurdy. "Predicting Nursing Home Utilization among the High-Risk Elderly," in David A. Wise, editor, "Issues in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press, 1990 (1990) AB - This paper explores the influence of various characteristics on nursing home utilization. It examines a targeted population of elderly individuals whose poor health and lack of social supports were expected to lead to heavy use of long-term care. We develop an empirical framework based on a transition probability model to describe the frequency and duration of nursing home admissions. Using longitudinal data on the high-risk elderly enrollees of the National Long-Term Care Demonstration ("Channeling" demonstration), we. find that a small set of characteristics distinguish individuals who are likely to be heavy utilizers of nursing homes from low utilizers. The factors associated with a high likelihood of institutionalization are not identical to the health characteristics associated with high mortality; for example, the likelihood of death increases with age, but nursing home utilization does not, when functional status and other characteristics are held constant. A somewhat healthier population might have used nursing homes more heavily than the Channeling participants, whose nursing home utilization was limited by high mortality. ER -