Siegel Michele J
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, USA.
Health Econ. 2006 Jun;15(6):579-601. doi: 10.1002/hec.1084.
A sizable proportion of women remain married well into late life and an increasing proportion of them participate in the labor force. Since women tend to marry men older than themselves and men tend to experience serious illnesses at younger ages than women, women frequently witness declining health in their husbands. This is likely to affect a wife's labor-leisure trade-off in offsetting ways. Prior studies have not sought to disentangle the effect of a husband's poor health on his wife's reservation wage from the income effect of his ill health. We argue that, if we control for husband's earnings, the coefficient of husband's health in models of his wife's labor force participation (and hours of work) will reflect, in part, her preference over whether to decrease her labor supply to provide health care for her husband or whether to instead increase it to purchase this care in the market. However, husband's earnings are likely to be endogenous in these models due to unobserved characteristics common to husbands and wives. We find that the estimated effect of husband's health depends on whether we instrument for husband's earnings and on the health measure used. This is indicative of the importance of using a variety of health measures and controlling for husband's earnings, and their endogeneity, in future research on the effect of husband's health on wife's labor supply.
相当大比例的女性在晚年仍保持婚姻状态，并且她们中参与劳动力市场的比例也在不断增加。由于女性倾向于嫁给比自己年长的男性，而男性往往比女性在更年轻的时候就会患上严重疾病，所以女性经常目睹丈夫健康状况的下降。这可能会以不同的方式影响妻子在劳动与休闲之间的权衡。先前的研究并未试图将丈夫健康状况不佳对其妻子保留工资的影响与他健康不佳的收入效应区分开来。我们认为，如果我们控制丈夫的收入，在其妻子劳动力参与（以及工作时长）模型中，丈夫健康状况的系数将部分反映出她在以下方面的偏好：是减少劳动力供给以便为丈夫提供医疗护理，还是增加劳动力供给以便在市场上购买这种护理。然而，在这些模型中，由于夫妻双方存在一些未被观察到的共同特征，丈夫的收入可能是内生的。我们发现，丈夫健康状况的估计效应取决于我们是否对丈夫的收入进行工具变量估计以及所使用的健康衡量指标。这表明在未来关于丈夫健康状况对妻子劳动力供给影响的研究中，使用多种健康衡量指标并控制丈夫的收入及其内生性是很重要的。
