Can We Insure Our Happiness?

Student: Han Da eun

Supervisor: Vitalijs Jascisens

Educational Programme: Economics (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 10

Year of Graduation: 2022

This paper studies how health insurance affects happiness. To answer this question, we use a health insurance reform in South Korea initiative to cover mental health care starting from 2018 July. We use panel data on social security benefits, subjective well-being measures, and socioeconomic status from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA), which covers the Korean population over 45. These figures span a 15-year period, from 2006 to 2020. Our analysis delivers two principal results. First, the 2018 health insurance reform positively effects on self-rated depression rate (CESD-10) of Korean seniors. On the other hand, we cannot claim that the health insurance reform affects individuals’ life satisfaction and depression. Second, the benefits of the health insurance reform accrue mostly to relatively advantaged individuals.

Full text (added April 30, 2022)

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