Search

This paper provides new estimates of the impact of the time to death on health care expenditures when the time to death is assumed endogenous. It further proposes estimation methods that take into account the right censoring of time to death. The data consist of twins from Denmark aged over 70 in 1999. The age of death of the mother and the living status of the co-twin are used as instruments for time to death. The results show that IV estimators give estimates higher than those obtained in previous studies when the time to death is assumed exogenous. Furthermore, the estimators proposed in this paper provide estimates that are generally lower compared to the ones obtained with the IV estimator. These results indicate that the impact of time to death has been potentially overestimated in previous studies.

This study uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate effects of an employment bonus program for long-term unemployed social assistance recipients. The program pays benefit bonuses to persons in the target group for any hours they work in regular employment or subsidized employment schemes. The program pays up to 6 % of post-tax earnings if they enter regular or subsidized employment over a specific two-year period. Our results show that the program has no effects on employment rates, earnings or participation in subsidized employment. The null findings are robust when using RD estimates based on different bandwidths and different window widths around the eligibility threshold and hold for given gender, age, ethnicity and parental status.

Background The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there is an association between stage of incident breast cancer (BC) and personal income three years after diagnosis. The analysis further considered whether the association differed among educational groups. Methods The study was based on information from Danish nationwide registers. A total of 7,372 women aged 30–60 years diagnosed with BC, 48% with metastasis, were compared to 213,276 controls. Generalised linear models were used to estimate the effect of a cancer diagnosis on personal gross income three years after diagnosis, stratified by education and stage of cancer. The models were adjusted for income two years prior to cancer diagnosis and demographic, geographic and co-morbidity covariates. Results Adjusting for income two years prior to cancer diagnosis and other baseline covariates (see above), cancer had a minor effect on personal income three years after diagnosis. The effect of metastatic BC was a statistically significant reduction in income three years after diagnosis of −3.4% (95% CI −4.8;-2.0), −2.8% (95% CI −4.3;-1.3) and −4.1 (95% CI −5.9;-2.3) among further, vocational and low educated women, respectively. The corresponding estimates for the effect of localised BC were −2.5% (95% CI −3.8; −1.2), −1.6% (95% CI −3.0; −0.2) and −1.7% (95% CI −3.7; 0.3); the latter estimate (for the low-educated) was not statistically different from zero. We found no statistically significant educational gradient in the effect of cancer stage on income. Conclusions In a Danish context, the very small negative effect of BC on personal income may be explained by different types of compensation in low- and high-income groups. The public income transfers are equal for all income groups and cover a relatively high compensation among low-income groups. However, high-income groups additionally receive pay-outs from private pension and insurance schemes, which typically provide higher coverage for high-income workers.