Auteurs : Quitterie Roquebert Marianne Tenand
Article publié dans : Health Economics, Volume26, Issue9, September 2017, Pages 1162-1174
Date de parution : 2017
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3531
Abstract : Little is known about the price sensitivity of demand for home care of the disabled elderly. We partially fill this knowledge gap by using administrative data on the beneficiaries of the main French home care subsidy program in a department and exploiting interindividual variation in provider prices. We address the potential endogeneity of prices by taking advantage of the unequal spatial coverage of providers and instrumenting price by the number of municipalities served by a provider. We estimate a price elasticity of around −0.4 that is significantly different from both 0 and −1. This less than proportionate response of consumption to price has implications for the efficiency and redistributive impact of variation in the level of copayments in home care subsidy schemes.