More information is available at the web page of the event.

Here is the abstract for my presentation at the upcoming Canadian Economics Association (CEA) conference in June 2012 in Calgary, Alberta, and at the Société canadienne de science économique (SCSE) conference in Mont-Tremblant, Québec :

Macroeconomic Consequences of Health Spending on Trends in Disability Among the Elderly (with Raquel Fonseca and Pierre-Carl Michaud)

Although disability has decreased among the elderly in the US, it could increase in the future due to the alarming trend in obesity and its consequences such as diabetes. This paper studies the macroeconomic impact of government interventions aiming to increase risk prevention in young agents. We introduce an overlapping generation model in which young, employed agents choose how much to save for retirement and invest in preventive care, while the elderly choose how much to spend on consumption and curative care. Calibrating our model on US data, we analyze the long-term welfare desirability and macroeconomic impact of government reforms of social security, co-payments for curative care and campaigns aiming to increase consumer awareness to health risks.

You can access it here. Note that the council also used my pictures for the release!

I have just made two updates to the website : I finally added content to the Research page, and updated my Resume.

Also, the experience at the Lindau 4th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings on Economic Sciences last August was incredible! I had the chance to shake hands with Akerlof and witness 17 Nobel Prize laureates present their newest work in only a few days. Here are the links to my personal pictures of the event and of the beautiful Lindau landscapes.

Great news : I am one of 380 young economists selected to meet 22 Nobel Laureates in the small city of Lindau, Germany, this upcoming August. Huge thanks to the SSHRC for supporting my candidacy and for its financial help.

For more information, visit the event’s website.

I also will have the honour of presenting my research at the 8th World Congress in Health Economics organised by the  International Health Economics Association (iHEA) , to be held in July 2011 in Toronto, Ontario!

Here is the abstract for my presentation in the upcoming Canadian Economics Association (CEA) conference in June 2011 in Ottawa, Ontario :

Public Policies, Health Care Demand and Budgetary Equilibrium in a Public-Financed System: A Dynamic Stochastic Analysis

Increasing health care costs over the last half century have been a growing source of concern for governments in OECD countries, which on average fund over 70% of these costs. To investigate the impact of public policies in this context, we develop a stochastic dynamic health care demand model characterized by waiting lines and zero or low monetary prices. Agents choose whether or not to use the public health care system at a given date in regards to their age, stock of health capital, wealth, anticipations of future health fluctuations and the congestion level of the system. By solving the model, we show that a government’s strongest lever to restrict over-consumption of health care in the short run is to allow for long waiting times. To determine the long run outcome of policies, we equate the global demand for health care of a distribution of agents to a public supply funded through income taxes, and iterate until reaching equilibrium in distribution. Calibrating our model using Québec data, we are able to obtain the social optimum among a variety of plausible policies and compare it to the policy chosen by the majority of the population. Preliminary results suggest that the considerable time needed to obtain equilibria in distribution may be such that the social optimum is impractical as a policy decision.