The impact of economic conditions on the disablement process: A Markov transition approach using SHARE data.

A growing number of studies underline the relationship between socioeconomic status and health at older ages. Following that literature, we explore the impact of economic conditions on changes in functional health overtime. Frailty, a state of physiological instability, has been identified in the public health literature as a candidate for disability prevention but received little attention from health economists. Using SHARE panel data, respondents aged 50 and over from ten European countries were categorised as robust, frail and dependent. The determinants of health states' changes between two interviews were analysed using multinomial Probit models accounting for potential sample attrition. A particular focus was made on initial socioeconomic status, proxied by three alternative measures. Concentration indices were computed for key transition probabilities. Across Europe, poorer and less educated elders were substantially more likely to experience health degradations and also less likely to experience health improvements. The economic gradient for the recovery from frailty was steeper than that of frailty onset, but remained lower than that of dependency onset. The existing social programs in favour of deprived and dependent elders could be widened to those diagnosed as frail to reduce the onset of dependency and economic inequalities in health at older ages.

[The life cycle of general practitioners' professional motivations: the case of prevention]. / Le cycle de vie des motivations professionnelles en médecine générale: une étude dans le champ de la prévention.

BACKGROUND: The analysis of "professional motivations", mainly through the possible crowding-out effects between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, has become an issue of great concern in the economic literature. This paper aims at applying this topic to the healthcare professions where the proper scaling up of pay-for-performance (P4P) policies by public authorities is at stake. METHODS: We used a panel of 528 self-employed general practitioners in the "Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur" region in France to provide an interpersonal statistical decomposition between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations with regard to preventive actions. Then, we applied a Tobit model in order to specify the main explicative variables of the share of intrinsic motivations entering into physicians' total motivations. RESULTS: The relative share of intrinsic motivations was quite high among physicians paid with fixed fees. We found a significant effect of age on intrinsic motivations describing a U-shaped curve which can be interpreted as being the result of a "life cycle of medical motivations" or a generational effect. CONCLUSION: The cross-sectional nature of the data does not allow us to draw any conclusions concerning the predominance of the generational effect or the "life cycle effect" on the evolution of the relative share of physician's intrinsic motivations. Nevertheless, the U-shaped relation between intrinsic motivations and age questions the suitability of using uniformly P4P mechanisms. The generations or age groups of self-employed physicians who seem to be less responsive to extrinsic motivations are more likely to favour the introduction of other types of payment schemes (capitation or salary systems) or regulation tools such as clinical practice guidelines.