Research FellowUniversity of Minnesota and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Mariacristina De Nardi is a Senior Scholar at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Minnesota.
She is also a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on savings, wealth inequality, social security, entrepreneurship and taxation.
Education
PhD Economics, University of Chicago, 1999
MA Economics, University of Chicago, 1998
BA (Distinction) Economics, Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1993
Medicaid is a government programme that also provides health insurance to the elderly who have few assets and either low income or catastrophic health care expenses. We ask how the Medicaid rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency, and we ask what other observable characteristics are important to determine who ends up on Medicaid.
The authors use detailed health care data for the period 2009–11 from nine countries to measure the composition and magnitude of medical spending in the three years before death.
The old age provisions of the Medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses. We estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime Medicaid transfers and Medicaid valuations across currently single retirees.
More work is needed to distinguish precautionary saving motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests. In this paper, progress toward disentangling these motivations has been made by matching other features of the data, such as public and private insurance choices.
