Determinants of Out of Pocket Health Expenditure in Turkey: Unconditional Quantile Regression

Out-of-pocket health expenditures include direct and indirect payments made by individuals for health goods and services. In this study, the determinants of out-of-pocket health expenditures, which are one of the most important sources of health expenditures financing, are investigated with the data of 2003-2015 Household Budget Survey using the Unconditional Quantitative Regression method proposed by Firpo et al. (2009). This method allows to produce generalizable and interpretable results in terms of political and general society compared with conditional quantitative regression methods. The most important result obtained from the study is that conditional quantitative regression method gives more consistent results than unconditional quantitative and least squares regression methods in the analyzes based on the right-skewed distribution observations such as out-of-pocket health expenditures.