IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/halshs-01144802.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal health investment and preferences structure

Author

Listed:
  • T Azomahou

    (United Nations University - MERIT)

  • Bity Diene

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Mbaye Diene

    (UCAD - Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar [Sénégal])

  • Luc Soete

    (UNU-MERIT - United Nations University - United Nations University)

Abstract

This paper develops a general equilibrium framework to study the role of preferences structure (additive, multiplicative and convex combination of both) in connecting consumption, health investment, stock of health and capital, and their effects on the wage rate and on productivity. We show that the elasticities of health production, health investment and health cost determine jointly how health influences the wage rate. We examine the steady state and the equilibrium dynamics of the model. In the case of additive preferences, the existence of equilibrium and the stability of the dynamic system require that the ratio of the elasticities of the cost of health and health investment is greater than the elasticity of the production function of health. Health stock can have either positive or negative effects on wage rate. The reverse holds for multiplicative preferences and the effect of health stock on wage rate is always positive. L ongevity is a decreasing convex-concave function of the elasticity of inter-temporal substitution of health. We also compare the relative behavior of opportunity costs of health under preferences structure.

Suggested Citation

  • T Azomahou & Bity Diene & Mbaye Diene & Luc Soete, 2015. "Optimal health investment and preferences structure," Working Papers halshs-01144802, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01144802
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01144802
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01144802/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson, 2007. "Disease and Development: The Effect of Life Expectancy on Economic Growth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(6), pages 925-985, December.
    2. Anthony Strittmatter & Uwe Sunde, 2013. "Health and economic development—evidence from the introduction of public health care," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(4), pages 1549-1584, October.
    3. Roger H. Gordon & Alan S. Blinder, 1980. "Market Wages, Reservation Wages, and Retirement Decisions," NBER Chapters, in: Econometric Studies in Public Finance, pages 277-308, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Boucekkine, Raouf & Laffargue, Jean-Pierre, 2010. "On the distributional consequences of epidemics," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 231-245, February.
    5. Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson, 2014. "Disease and Development: A Reply to Bloom, Canning, and Fink," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(6), pages 1367-1375.
    6. Cuddington, John T. & Hancock, John D., 1994. "Assessing the impact of AIDS on the growth path of the Malawian economy," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 363-368, April.
    7. Thomas B. L. Kirkwood, 2008. "A systematic look at an old problem," Nature, Nature, vol. 451(7179), pages 644-647, February.
    8. Weil, David N., 2014. "Health and Economic Growth," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 3, pages 623-682, Elsevier.
    9. Goenka, Aditya & Liu, Lin & Nguyen, Manh-Hung, 2014. "Infectious diseases and economic growth," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 34-53.
    10. Corrigan, Paul & Glomm, Gerhard & Mendez, Fabio, 2005. "AIDS crisis and growth," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 107-124, June.
    11. Lancaster, Tony & Chesher, Andrew, 1983. "An Econometric Analysis of Reservation Wages," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(6), pages 1661-1676, November.
    12. Lixin Cai, 2009. "Effects of Health on Wages of Australian Men," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 85(270), pages 290-306, September.
    13. Robert E. Hall & Charles I. Jones, 2007. "The Value of Life and the Rise in Health Spending," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(1), pages 39-72.
    14. McDonald, Scott & Roberts, Jennifer, 2006. "AIDS and economic growth: A human capital approach," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(1), pages 228-250, June.
    15. Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), 2014. "Handbook of Economic Growth," Handbook of Economic Growth, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 2, number 2.
    16. Grossman, Michael, 1972. "On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 80(2), pages 223-255, March-Apr.
    17. Blackaby, D.H. & Latreille, P.L. & Murphy, P.D. & O'Leary, N.C. & Sloane, P.J., 2007. "An analysis of reservation wages for the economically inactive," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 97(1), pages 1-5, October.
    18. Chakraborty, Shankha, 2004. "Endogenous lifetime and economic growth," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 116(1), pages 119-137, May.
    19. Bloom, David E. & Mahal, Ajay S., 1997. "Does the AIDS epidemic threaten economic growth?," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 105-124, March.
    20. Quamrul H. Ashraf & Ashley Lester & David N. Weil, 2009. "When Does Improving Health Raise GDP?," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2008, Volume 23, pages 157-204, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    21. Haveman, Robert & Wolfe, Barbara & Kreider, Brent & Stone, Mark, 1994. "Market work, wages, and men's health," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 163-182, July.
    22. Michael Grossman & Lee Benham, 1974. "Health, Hours and Wages," International Economic Association Series, in: Mark Perlman (ed.), The Economics of Health and Medical Care, chapter 12, pages 205-233, Palgrave Macmillan.
    23. Sarah Brown & Jennifer Roberts & Karl Taylor, 2010. "Reservation wages, labour market participation and health," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 173(3), pages 501-529, July.
    24. Lee, Lung-Fei, 1982. "Health and Wage: A Simultaneous Equation Model with Multiple Discrete Indicators," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 23(1), pages 199-221, February.
    25. Ehrlich, Isaac & Chuma, Hiroyuki, 1990. "A Model of the Demand for Longevity and the Value of Life Extension," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(4), pages 761-782, August.
    26. Aditya Goenka & Lin Liu, 2012. "Infectious diseases and endogenous fluctuations," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 50(1), pages 125-149, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tanguy Le Fur & Alain Trannoy, 2024. "The Health-Maximizing Level of Labor Supply: A Macroeconomic Perspective on the American Health Puzzle," AMSE Working Papers 2419, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Azomahou, Theophile & Soete, Luc & Diene, Bity & Diene, Mbaye, 2012. "Optimal health investment with separable and non-separable preferences," MERIT Working Papers 2012-047, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    2. David E. Bloom & Michael Kuhn & Klaus Prettner, 2022. "Modern Infectious Diseases: Macroeconomic Impacts and Policy Responses," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 60(1), pages 85-131, March.
    3. Paul Cahu & Falilou Fall, 2011. "Accounting for the effects of AIDS on growth in Sub-Saharan Africa," Post-Print halshs-00609798, HAL.
    4. Alfredo M. Pereira & Rui M. Pereira & Pedro G. Rodrigues, 2019. "Health care investments and economic performance in Portugal: an industry level analysis," Journal of Economic Studies, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 46(6), pages 1174-1200, October.
    5. Raouf Boucekkine & Bity Diene & Theophile Azomahou, 2008. "Growth Economics of Epidemics: A Review of the Theory," Mathematical Population Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(1), pages 1-26.
    6. Yolanda Pena-Boquete & Manuel Flores, 2013. "Earnings returns to education, experience and health: Evidence from EU-SILC," ERSA conference papers ersa13p1169, European Regional Science Association.
    7. Beniamino Callegari & Christophe Feder, 2022. "A Literature Review of Pandemics and Development: the Long-Term Perspective," Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 183-212, March.
    8. Manuel Flores & Adriaan Kalwij, 2019. "What Do Wages Add to the Health‐Employment Nexus? Evidence from Older European Workers," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 81(1), pages 123-145, February.
    9. Sarah Brown & Jennifer Roberts & Karl Taylor, 2010. "Reservation wages, labour market participation and health," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 173(3), pages 501-529, July.
    10. Aditya Goenka & Lin Liu, 2020. "Infectious diseases, human capital and economic growth," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(1), pages 1-47, July.
    11. Kuhn, Michael & Prettner, Klaus, 2016. "Growth and welfare effects of health care in knowledge-based economies," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 100-119.
    12. Goenka, Aditya & Liu, Lin & Nguyen, Manh-Hung, 2014. "Infectious diseases and economic growth," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 34-53.
    13. Olufunmilayo Olayemi Jemiluyi & Ifeoluwa Alao-Owunna, 2020. "A Reconsideration of the Health Status – Economic Growth Nexus: Evaluation of the Gender Differential Effect in Nigeria," Eurasian Journal of Economics and Finance, Eurasian Publications, vol. 8(4), pages 217-230.
    14. Declan French, 2012. "Causation between health and income: a need to panic," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 583-601, April.
    15. Gallardo-Albarrán, Daniel, 2018. "Health and economic development since 1900," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 228-237.
    16. Yin-Chi Wang, 2011. "Health, Education and Development," 2011 Meeting Papers 1263, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Jenny Lye & Joe Hirschberg, 2010. "Alcohol Consumption And Human Capital: A Retrospective Study Of The Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(2), pages 309-338, April.
    18. Luca Gori & Cristiana Mammana & Piero Manfredi & Elisabetta Michetti, 2022. "Economic development with deadly communicable diseases and public prevention," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 24(5), pages 912-943, October.
    19. Chen, Li-Shiun & Wang, Ping & Yao, Yao, 2018. "Power of personalized smoking cessation: A unified lifecycle framework for policy evaluation," Working Paper Series 20333, Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance.
    20. Laurent Brembilla, 2016. "Endogenous lifetime and economic growth: the roleof the tax rate," Economic Theory Bulletin, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 4(2), pages 247-263, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    opportunity costs; longevity; wage rates; preferences structure; health investment; Consumption;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development
    • C62 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium
    • C61 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01144802. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.