Among all the industrialized countries, Japan has the fastest rate of population aging and the highest life expectancy at birth. It is projected that the proportion of elderly people will reach 35.7&#37 in 2050. In this demographic environment, Japan launched a social insurance program for long-term care for the elderly in 2000. What were the forces that led Japan to establish a long-term care ...

BACKGROUND In ageing populations, informal care holds great potential to limit rising health care expenditure. The majority of informal care is delivered by spouses. The loss of informal care due to the death of the spouse could therefore increase expenditure levels for formal care. OBJECTIVE To investigate the impact of the death of the spouse on health care expenditure by older people throu...

We build a life-cycle model of household consumption and saving decisions, where long term care (LTC) expenditures are endogenous. We use an LTC-state dependent utility function where regular consumption and LTC are valued differently. The model includes both married and single households, thus capturing important family dynamics that are important for precautionary savings and LTC decisions. M...

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