Caregiving decisions in two-worker households, health insurance and medical care

The first chapter explores how husbands and wives respond differently to economic factors when deciding who should take leave to care for sick family members. Focusing on households in which both the husband and wife participate in the labor market, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey of 2003 enables me to investigate the factors that affect caregiving. The results show that the wives' own wage is a significant determinant of lost work days due to other family members' illness. Economic factors are significant determinants of caregiving decisions, however characteristics of husbands affect wives more than vice versa. Results also show that controlling for the heterogeneity of household and allowing the correlation between husband's wage and wife's wage are important in the estimation of the effect of economic factors.;The second chapter explores parent's choice of insurance coverage for their children and examines how these decisions are affected by economic factors. Maximum simulated likelihood estimation is employed to control for unobservable heterogeneity of families. The results show that parents are less responsive to family income when buying their children's health insurance than when purchasing their own health insurance. This finding implies that income subsidies to promote health insurance may not affect all family members equally within the same household.;Little work has been done to assess "sick leave" days due to illness of non-market labor suppliers. By examining bed-days-at-home, the third chapter considers the role of health insurance in the decision on bed-days-at-home as an alternative to medical treatment. In contrast with previous findings that absence from work and medical treatment use among working males may be complements, my analysis of non-working married women without health insurance indicates that these women use "rest" and medical treatment as substitutes, not complements.