中文摘要
我们记录了德国在整个生命周期中不同健康状况群体之间存在的显著财富差距。德国拥有全民医疗保健体系，自付医疗费用可忽略不计。为探究这些财富—健康差距的根本来源，我们构建了一个异质性个体生命周期模型，其中健康与财富内生演化。在模型中，个体付出努力以践行健康的生活方式，这有助于未来维持良好的健康状况。努力选择，即生活方式行为，存在调整成本，以刻画数据中此类行为的习惯性特征。我们发现，估计得到的模型能够再现现实中不同健康状况群体之间财富差距的绝大部分，并量化了健康影响这些差距所经由的劳动收入和储蓄渠道的作用。我们表明，个体为保持健康所付出的努力存在差异，这些差异解释了模型所生成的不同健康状况群体之间财富差距的约四分之一，说明努力差异是这些差距背后的一种放大机制。
Abstract
We document significant gaps in wealth across health status over the life cycle in Germany—a country with a universal healthcare system and negligible out‐of‐pocket medical expenses. To investigate the underlying sources of these wealth‐health gaps, we build a heterogeneous‐agent life‐cycle model in which health and wealth evolve endogenously. In the model, agents exert efforts to lead a healthy lifestyle, which helps maintain good health status in the future. Effort choices, or lifestyle behaviors, are subject to adjustment costs to capture their habitual nature in the data. We find that our estimated model generates the great majority of the empirical wealth gaps by health and quantify the role of earnings and savings channels through which health affects these gaps. We show that variations in individual health efforts account for around a quarter of the model‐generated wealth gaps by health, illustrating their role as an amplification mechanism behind the gaps.