Chiara Canta

Long-Term Care Insurance and Family Norms

Abstract: Long-term care (LTC) is mainly provided by the family and subsidiarily by the market and the government. To understand the role of these three institutions, it is important to understand the motives and the working of family solidarity. In this paper, we focus on the case when LTC is provided by children to their dependent parents out of some norm that has been inculcated to them during their childhood by some exemplary behavior of their parents towards their own parents. In the first part, we look at the interaction between the family and the market in providing for LTC. The key parameters are the probability of dependence, the probability of having a norm-abiding child and the loading factor. In the second part, we introduce the government which has a double mission: correct for a prevailing externality and redistribute resources across heterogeneous households.

Reforms of the National Health Service and dynamics of hospital efficiency in Piedmont

In this paper we estimate cost efficiency and technological characteristics of public hospitals in Piedmont over the period from 2000 to 2004. During the Nineties, different regulatory reforms aiming at controlling health expenditure affected the Italian National Health Service, ranging from the introduction of a new reimbursement scheme for hospitals (DRG-based) at the micro level, to the implementation of fiscal federalism at the macro level. We argue that all these legislative interventions rendered producers more prone to control costs, in order to be able to meet financial constraints. Our empirical findings support this hypothesis: average cost inefficiency, computed after estimating a Translog stochastic cost frontier by the Battese and Coelli (1992) approach, reduced remarkably during the observed years, while the adoption of more effective technologies shifted upward the minimum-cost frontier. We also find evidence of relevant scale economies not exploited by producers, which decrease with hospital size (number of beds) and output complexity (average DRG weight).

Smoking within the Household: Spousal Peer Effects and Children's Health Implications

Abstract We study spousal peer effects on smoking and their implication for the health of children. Smoking decisions are modeled as equilibrium strategies of an incomplete information game within the couple. Using French data, we identify two peer effects: a smoking enhancing effect of smoking partners and a smoking deterring effect of non-smoking partners. An implication of these findings is that the smoking behavior may differ qualitatively in couples where both partners smoke and where only one partner smokes. This interpretation is supported by our finding that, controlling for total tobacco consumption of parents, the respiratory health of children is negatively affected only if both parents smoke.