Department of Economics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA.
Health Econ. 2010 Dec;19(12):1441-60. doi: 10.1002/hec.1562.
A number of recent studies find that poor health is empirically associated with a safer portfolio allocation. It is difficult to say, however, whether this relationship is truly causal. Both health status and portfolio choice are influenced by unobserved characteristics such as risk attitudes, impatience, information, and motivation, and these unobserved factors, if not adequately controlled for, can induce significant bias in the estimates of asset demand equations. Using the 1992-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we investigate how much of the connection between health and portfolio choice is causal and how much is due to the effects of unobserved heterogeneity. Accounting for unobserved heterogeneity with fixed effects and correlated random effects models, we find that health does not appear to significantly affect portfolio choice among single households. For married households, we find a small effect (about 2-3 percentage points) from being in the lowest of five self-reported health categories.
一些最近的研究发现，健康状况不佳与更安全的投资组合配置在经验上是相关的。然而，很难说这种关系是否真的具有因果关系。健康状况和投资组合选择都受到风险态度、不耐烦、信息和动机等未观察到的特征的影响，如果这些未观察到的因素没有得到充分控制，它们可能会导致资产需求方程的估计产生显著偏差。我们使用了 1992-2006 年健康与退休研究的数据，研究了健康与投资组合选择之间的联系有多少是因果关系，有多少是由于未观察到的异质性的影响。通过固定效应和相关随机效应模型来考虑未观察到的异质性，我们发现健康状况似乎不会显著影响单身家庭的投资组合选择。对于已婚家庭，我们发现处于五个自我报告的健康类别中最低类别的家庭，投资组合选择会受到较小的影响（约 2-3 个百分点）。
