Aging, health care spending and inequalities in health care utilization: essays in applied microeconometrics.

Summary The purpose of this thesis is to analyze health care consumption behaviors and their impact on the evolution and distribution of health care expenditures in the population. We conduct an analysis on individual data and use original microsimulation methods in order to highlight the effects of heterogeneity of behavior at the individual level. The first chapter presents the econometric methods used to estimate explanatory equations of health care consumption on individual data. A second chapter develops an original method to analyze the factors of the increase in health care expenditure, and shows that this increase is mainly due to changes in health care behavior, and very little to demographic aging. A third chapter proposes an innovative method of decomposing inequalities in health care consumption by factor. We show that half of the observed inequity is due to heterogeneity in behavior, which is not identifiable in standard decompositions.