Preferences, mental health, health insurance decisions, and inequalities in the use of care among young adults in France.

Summary This thesis contributes to the understanding of human capital investment decisions of young adults in France. Young adults are in a decisive period in terms of their development and expression of preferences. Particular attention is paid to preferences, as well as to the resulting inequalities. The first chapter focuses on the roles of anticipatory treatment and multivariate preferences in the health insurance decision. Predictions from a theoretical model are tested on data collected in an experimental laboratory. Results show that higher health preference leads to more intensive treatment demand and that being correlation averse leads to more than full coverage. In the second chapter, using survey data, it is shown that differences in the use of care are primarily associated with need, followed by circumstances, reflecting inequalities of opportunity, and effort, reflecting fair inequalities. The third chapter focuses on the effect of students' psychological fragilities on their control beliefs. The instrumental variable strategy shows that more psychological frailties lead to increased control beliefs, which is consistent with the psychological literature that depressed and anxious individuals blame themselves more.