Topic：Too Busy to Be Cured？

 

Time: 10:00-12:00, September 25, 2019 (Wednesday) 

 

Venue: Room 9406, Jingshi Building, Beijing Normal University 

 

Speaker: Huang Wei 

 

Distinguished Assistant Professor, President, National University of Singapore 

 

Host: Luo Chuliang 

 

Professor, BNUBS

 

About the speaker:

 

Dr Huang Wei is the President's Distinguished Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore.  Dr. Huang was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Dr. Huang received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2016, his master's degree in economics from The National School of Development, Peking University in 2011, and his bachelor's degree in Physics from the School of Physics, Peking University in 2008. His research areas are public economics, labor economics and health economics.  His research interests are in the areas of health, education and ethnicity. His research has been published in Review of Economic and Statistics, Journal of Labor Economics, American Economic Journal:  Applied Economics, Nature, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Since 2018, he has been co-editor of Economics of Transition. 

 

 

About the lecture:

Monetary cost is emphasized in health economics literature but time cost is largely ignored. This paper investigates how time cost affects the healthcare usage in both China and the US. Using the retirement age policy in both countries, I employ a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and find that the level of hospitalization persistently increases after retirement age. Specifically, a 10 percentage points lower employment is significantly associated with 1.6-3.8 percentage points higher in hospitalization. In addition, the effects are significant among high education people but not in low education group. Finally, eligible people do more physical exercise and have higher healthcare expenditure after retirement age. These results provide a more comprehensive picture of moral hazard and add up to the growing literature about retirement and time use in economics.