TY  - JOUR
AU  - Chou,Shin-Yi
AU  - Liu,Jin-Tan
AU  - Hammitt,James K.
TI  - Health Insurance and Households' Precautionary Behaviors - An Unusual Natural Experiment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9394
PY  - 2002
Y2  - December 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9394
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9394.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Shin-Yi Chou
Department of Economics
College of Business and Economics
Lehigh University
621 Taylor Street
Bethlehem, PA  18015-3117
Tel:  610/758-3444
Fax: NA
E-Mail: syc2@lehigh.edu

Jin-Tan Liu
Department of Economics
National Taiwan University
21 Hsu-Chow Road
Taipei (100), TAIWAN
Tel: 886-2-23519641/520
Fax: 886-2-2351-1826
E-Mail: liujt@ntu.edu.tw
AB  - By reducing risk of large out-of-pocket medical expenses, comprehensive social health insurance may reduce households' motivation to engage in precautionary behaviors such as saving, procurement of private insurance, and spousal labor-force participation. We use the natural experiment provided by the 1995 introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan to examine these effects, using pre-existing differences in access to health insurance (tied to the household head's and spouse's joint employment status) to identify the effects of increasing insurance coverage. We find that comprehensive health insurance has a statistically significant and large effect on household savings and purchase of private accident insurance, but no significant effect on spousal employment.
ER  -