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The impact of HIV/AIDS on marriage in the early years of the epidemic Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Hasan Shahid
The advent of the HIV/AIDS crisis transformed the desirability of committed heterosexual relationships. This paper employs a difference‐in‐differences approach to investigate the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis on marriage rates. By using HIV/AIDS death rates as a proxy for HIV incidence, the study exploits county‐level variations in HIV/AIDS mortality and finds that counties with higher HIV/AIDS death
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Optimal self‐protection and health risk perceptions: Exploring connections between risk theory and the Health Belief Model Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Emmanuelle Augeraud‐Véron, Marc Leandri
In this contribution to the longstanding risk theory debate on optimal self‐protection, we aim to enrich the microeconomic modeling of self‐protection, in the wake of Ehrlich and Becker (1972), by exploring the representation of risk perception at the core of the Health Belief Model (HBM), a conceptual framework extremely influential in Public Health studies (Janz and Becker, 1984). In our two‐period
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Harmonizing regulatory market approval of products with high safety requirements: Evidence from the European pharmaceutical market Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Fabian Grünwald, Tom Stargardt
We causally analyzed whether being a member of the European Union (EU) and having access to a centralized marketing authorization procedure (centralized procedure [CP]) affects availability and time to launch of new pharmaceuticals. We employed multiple difference‐in‐differences models, exploiting the eastern enlargement of the EU as well as changes in the indications that fall within the compulsory
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Paid family leave and the fight against hunger: Evidence from New York Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Jiyoon Kim, Otto Lenhart
We examine the effects of New York's paid family leave (PFL) policy, introduced in January 2018, on food security. While researchers evaluating PFL policies in the past have mostly focused on employment and health outcomes, we believe that an improved understanding of potential impacts on food security is pivotal as it is directly related to the health and well‐being of mothers and new‐borns during
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The impact of juvenile curfews on teenage birth rates Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Aaron M. Gamino
I examine the effect of city‐level juvenile curfews on teenage birth rates using the National Center for Health Statistics birth data from 1982 to 2002. I compare differences in birth rates between younger and older age groups in cities with and without curfew ordinances. Before curfew adoption, the age differential in birth rates trended similarly for cities that did and did not adopt a curfew. There
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The optimal design of assisted reproductive technologies policies Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Marie‐Louise Leroux, Pierre Pestieau, Gregory Ponthiere
This paper studies the optimal fiscal treatment of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in an economy where individuals differ in their reproductive capacity (or fecundity) and in their wage. We find that the optimal ART tax policy varies with the postulated social welfare criterion. Utilitarianism redistributes only between individuals with unequal fecundity and wages but not between parents and
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Joint effects of Medicaid eligibility and fees on recession‐linked declines in healthcare access and health status Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Joseph Benitez, Kevin Callison, E. Kathleen Adams
Whether Medicaid can function as a safety net to offset health risks created by health insurance coverage losses due to job loss is conditional on (1) the eligibility guidelines shaping the pathway for households to access the program for temporary relief, and (2) Medicaid reimbursement policies affecting the value of the program for both the newly and previously enrolled. We find states with more
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The infant health effects of doulas: Leveraging big data and machine learning to inform cost‐effective targeting Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Evan D. Peet, Dana Schultz, Susan Lovejoy, Fuchiang (Rich) Tsui
Doula services represent an underutilized maternal and child health intervention with the potential to improve outcomes through the provision of physical, emotional, and informational support. However, there is limited evidence of the infant health effects of doulas despite well‐established connections between maternal and infant health. Moreover, because the availability of doulas is limited and often
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Bridging the gap: Experimental evidence on information provision and health insurance choices Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Ana Cecilia Quiroga Gutierrez, Stefan Boes
Previous research has shown that individuals do not always make rational decisions when selecting their health insurance, for example, due to the existence of information frictions or mental gaps. We study the effect of specific types of information provision for decision support on health plan choices and test their potential to improve decision quality by implementing a randomized laboratory experiment
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Issue Information Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-02
No abstract is available for this article.
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The effect of combat deployments on veteran opioid abuse Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Resul Cesur, Joseph J. Sabia, W. David Bradford
Grim national statistics about the U.S. opioid crisis are increasingly well known to the American public. Far less well known is that U.S. servicemembers are at ground zero of the epidemic, with veterans facing an overdose death rate of up to twice that of civilians. Exploiting a quasi‐experiment in overseas deployment assignment, this study estimates the causal impact of combat exposure among the
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Media coverage and pandemic behavior: Evidence from Sweden Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Marcel Garz, Maiting Zhuang
We study the effect of media coverage on individual behavior during a public health crisis. For this purpose, we collect a unique dataset of 200,000 newspaper articles about the Covid‐19 pandemic from Sweden—one of the few countries that did not impose lockdowns or curfews. We show that mentions of Covid‐19 significantly lowered the number of visits to workplaces and retail and recreation areas, while
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Using data on biomarkers and siblings to study early‐life economic determinants of type‐2 diabetes Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Rob J. M. Alessie, Viola Angelini, Gerard J. van den Berg, Jochen O. Mierau, Gianmaria Niccodemi
We study the effect of economic conditions early in life on the occurrence of type‐2 diabetes in adulthood using contextual economic indicators and within‐sibling pair variation. We use data from Lifelines: a longitudinal cohort study and biobank including 51,270 siblings born in the Netherlands from 1950 onward. Sibling fixed‐effects account for selective fertility. To identify type‐2 diabetes we
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Compliance in the public versus the private realm: Economic preferences, institutional trust and COVID‐19 health behaviors Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Henrike Sternberg, Janina Isabel Steinert, Tim Büthe
To what extent do economic preferences and institutional trust predict compliance with physical distancing rules during the COVID‐19 pandemic? We reexamine this question by introducing the theoretical and empirical distinction between individual health behaviors in the public and in the private domain (e.g., keeping a distance from strangers vs. abstaining from private gatherings with friends). Using
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Financial protection in health revisited: Is catastrophic health spending underestimated for service‐ or disease‐specific analysis? Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 John E. Ataguba, Hyacinth E. Ichoku, Marie‐Gloriose Ingabire, James Akazili
Economists originally developed methods to assess financial catastrophe using total or aggregate out‐of‐pocket health spending. Aggregate out‐of‐pocket health spending is financially catastrophic when it exceeds a fixed proportion (i.e., threshold) of a household's total income or expenditure in a given period. However, these methods are now applied to assess financial catastrophe in disease‐ or service‐specific
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How do surrogates make treatment decisions for patients with dementia: An experimental survey study Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Lauren Hersch Nicholas, Kenneth M. Langa, Scott D. Halpern, Mario Macis
Despite the growing need for surrogate decision-making for older adults, little is known about how surrogates make decisions and whether advance directives would change decision-making. We conducted a nationally representative experimental survey that cross-randomized cognitive impairment, gender, and characteristics of advance care planning among hospitalized older adults through a series of vignettes
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Effects of private health insurance on waiting time in public hospitals Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Ou Yang, Jongsay Yong, Yuting Zhang
The Australian government pays $6.7 billion per year in rebates to encourage Australians to purchase private health insurance (PHI) and an additional $6.1 billion to cover services provided in private hospitals. What is the justification for large government subsidies to a private industry when all Australians already have free coverage under Medicare? The government argues that more people buying
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Mothers' school starting age and infant health Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-11 Cristina Borra, Libertad González, David Patiño
We study the effects of women's school starting age on the infant health of their offspring. In Spain, children born in December start school a year earlier than those born the following January, despite being essentially the same age. We follow a regression discontinuity design to compare the health at birth of the children of women born in January versus the previous December, using administrative
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Exiting primary care providers Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Katrin Zocher
This article studies the impact of primary care providers (PCPs) exit from the local health care system on patients' health care utilization. I compare patients with each other whose physicians have left the local health care system at different points in time due to retirement, relocation, or other reasons. Estimation results indicate that the imminent exit leads soon-leaving physicians to changing
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Why do drinkers earn more? Job characteristics as a possible link Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Yihong Bai, Michel Grignon
After some initial controversy, an inverted U-shape relationship between the consumption of alcohol and earnings seems to be an established result, at least in North America. It has been dubbed a “drinking premium”, at least in the lower portion of the consumption curve. It is still unclear, perhaps even counter-intuitive, why such a drinking premium exists and the literature suggests it is not causal
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The effects of social pensions on nutrition-related health outcomes of the poor: Quasi-experimental evidence from Peru Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Noelia Bernal, Javier Olivera, Marc Suhrcke
This paper exploits the discontinuity around a welfare index of eligibility to assess the impact of Peru's social pension program Pension 65 on nutrition-related health outcomes among elderly poor individuals. Overall, we find evidence of how a relatively inexpensive program can produce improvements in anemia and nutrition-related mortality risk markers. The effects appear to be driven by plausible
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The direct and spillover effects of diabetes diagnosis on lifestyle behaviours Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Rhys Llewellyn Thomas, Emmanouil Mentzakis
Using blood sample data we exploit an arbitrary cut-off of diabetes risk and through a fuzzy regression kink design we estimate the effect of a diabetes diagnosis on own and partner health-related behaviours. Diabetes diagnosis increases the probability of exercising, both for those diagnosed with diabetes and their partner. We also conduct mediation analysis which suggests that joint household participation
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Should it stay, or swerve? Trading off lives in dilemma situations involving autonomous cars Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Wolfgang Habla, Mitesh Kataria, Peter Martinsson, Kerstin Roeder
Using a representative survey with 1317 individuals and 12,815 moral decisions, we elicit Swedish citizens' preferences on how algorithms for self-driving cars should be programmed in cases of unavoidable harm to humans. Participants' choices in different dilemma situations (treatments) show that, at the margin, the average respondent values the lives of passengers and pedestrians equally when both
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Physician responses to insurance benefit restrictions: The case of ophthalmology Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Olukorede Abiona, Phil Haywood, Serena Yu, Jane Hall, Denzil G. Fiebig, Kees van Gool
This study examines the impact of social insurance benefit restrictions on physician behaviour, using ophthalmologists as a case study. We examine whether ophthalmologists use their market power to alter their fees and rebates across services to compensate for potential policy-induced income losses. The results show that ophthalmologists substantially reduced their fees and rebates for services directly
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Exploring health preference heterogeneity in the UK: Using the online elicitation of personal utility functions approach to construct EQ-5D-5L value functions on societal, group and individual level Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Paul Schneider, Nancy Devlin, Ben van Hout, John Brazier
A new method has recently been developed for valuing health states, called ‘Online elicitation of Personal Utility Functions’ (OPUF). In contrast to established methods, such as time trade-off or discrete choice experiments, OPUF does not require hundreds of respondents, but allows estimating utility functions for small groups and even at the individual level. In this study, we used OPUF to elicit
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Child health and its effect on adult social capital accumulation Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Michael Lebenbaum, Claire de Oliveira, France Gagnon, Audrey Laporte
Although studies have demonstrated important effects of poor health in childhood on stocks of human and health capital, little research has tested economic theories to investigate the effect of child health on social capital in adulthood. Studies on the influence of child health on adult social capital are mixed and have not used sibling fixed effects models to account for unmeasured family and genetic
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How do hospitals respond to payment unbundling for diagnostic imaging of suspected cancer patients? Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Helen Hayes, Jonathan Stokes, Matt Sutton, Rachel Meacock
Payments for some diagnostic scans undertaken in outpatient settings were unbundled from Diagnosis Related Group based payments in England in April 2013 to address under-provision. Unbundled scans attracted additional payments of between £45 and £748 directly following the reform. We examined the effect on utilization of these scans for patients with suspected cancer. We also explored whether any detected
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Achieving dynamic efficiency in pharmaceutical innovation: Identifying the optimal share of value and payments required Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Beth Woods, James Lomas, Mark Sculpher, Helen Weatherly, Karl Claxton
It has been argued that cost-effectiveness analysis of branded pharmaceuticals only considers static efficiency, neglects dynamic effects and undermines incentives for socially valuable innovation. We present a framework for designing pharmaceutical pricing policy to achieve dynamic efficiency. We develop a coherent framework that identifies the long-term static and dynamic benefits and costs of offering
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Impacts of Norway's extended free choice reform on waiting times and hospital visits Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Ge Ge, Tor Iversen, Oddvar Kaarbøe, Øyvind Snilsberg
Norway's extended free choice (EFC) reform extends the patient's choice of publicly funded hospitals for treatment to authorized private institutions (EFC providers). We study the effects of the reform on waiting times, number of visits, and patients' Charlson Comorbidity Index scores in public hospitals. We use a difference-in-differences model to compare changes over time for public hospitals with
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Addressing the distributional consequences of spillovers in health economic evaluation: A prioritarian approach Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-07 Edward Henry, John Cullinan
Health spillovers arise when an individual's serious illness affects those close to them emotionally, psychologically, and/or physically. As a result, healthcare interventions that improve the lives of patients may also confer wider health benefits. However, contrary to widespread calls for health spillovers to be included in health economic evaluation, others have argued this could have adverse distributional
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Issue Information Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-01
No abstract is available for this article.
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A panel vector autoregression analysis for the dynamics of medical and long-term care expenditures Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-30 Shinya Sugawara, Tsunehiro Ishihara, Susumu Kunisawa, Etsu Goto, Yuichi Imanaka
Although medical and long-term care expenditures for older adults are closely related, providing rigorous statistical analysis for their dynamic relationship is challenging. In this research, we propose a novel approach using the panel vector autoregression model to reveal the realized patterns of the interdependence. As an empirical application, we analyze monthly panel data on individuals in a city
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An analysis of a rural hospital's investment decision under different payment systems Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Xidong Guo
From an economic perspective, large investments in medical equipment are justifiable only when many patients benefit. Although rural hospitals play a crucial role locally, the treatments they can offer are limited. In this study, I characterize investment level that maximizes the total surplus, encompassing patients' welfare and producer surplus, and subtracting treatment costs. Specifically, I account
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Financial incentives and prescribing behavior in primary care Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Olivia Bodnar, Hugh Gravelle, Nils Gutacker, Annika Herr
Many healthcare systems prohibit primary care physicians from dispensing the drugs they prescribe due to concerns that this encourages excessive, ineffective or unnecessarily costly prescribing. Using data from the English National Health Service for 2011–2018, we estimate the impact of physician dispensing rights on prescribing behavior at the extensive margin (comparing practices that dispense and
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Social fund and infant mortality: Evidence from an anti-poverty policy in Northeast Brazil Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Álvaro Robério de Souza Sá, Danyelle Karine Santos Branco
This paper evaluates the effects of a social fund that meets the needs of the poor in Northeast Brazil, the Fundos Estaduais de Combate e Erradicação da Pobreza (FECEP). The program could have improved infant health by reducing poverty and improving access to health care, sanitation, food, and housing. Using a difference-in-differences approach robust to heterogeneous treatment effects, we confirm
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How important are delays in treatment for health outcomes? The case of ambulance response time and cardiovascular events Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Elena Lucchese
The cost effectiveness of medical treatments is not precisely known due to the compounding effect of multiple determining factors. Ambulance response time (RT) to emergency calls is exploited to learn more about the effect of the timing of treatment on health outcomes. This causal relation is identified by exploiting rainfall at the time of the ambulance run as a shock to RT. The analysis focuses on
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Age penalties and take-up of private health insurance Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-23 Nathan Kettlewell, Yuting Zhang
Financial penalties for delayed enrollment could be useful tools to encourage people to enroll earlier in health insurance markets, but little is known about how effective they are. We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a step-wise age-based penalty, and whether the effect has changed over time. Individuals must pay
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Capital flight and public health outcomes in Africa Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Yacouba Kassouri
Motivated by the momentous concerns over the development challenges associated with capital flight and the persistent lack of funding to improve healthcare in Africa, this study investigates the effects of capital flight on public health outcomes. Exploiting regional variations in capital flight stemming from differences in exchange rate regimes across CFA (Communaute Financiere Africaine) zone countries
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The effect of Medicaid expansion on the take-up of disability benefits by race and ethnicity Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Becky Staiger, Madeline Helfer, Jessica Van Parys
Public disability programs provide financial support to 12 million working-age individuals per year, though not all eligible individuals take up these programs. Mixed evidence exists regarding the impact of Medicaid eligibility expansion on program take-up, and even less is known about the relationship between Medicaid expansion and racial and ethnic disparities in take-up. Using 2009–2020 Current
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The effects of education on mortality: Evidence using college expansions Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Jason Fletcher, Hamid Noghanibehambari
This paper explores the long-run health benefits of education for longevity. Using mortality data from the Social Security Administration (1988–2005) linked to geographic locations in the 1940-census data, we exploit changes in college availability across cohorts in local areas. Our treatment on the treated calculations suggest increases in longevity between 1.3 and 2.7 years. Some further analyses
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Allocating aid for COVID-19 support: A constrained optimisation approach Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Simon Feeny
The objective of this paper is to develop a prescriptive model for the inter-country allocation of aid for COVID-19 support. Aid allocations are increasing functions of three dimensions of need: (i) hazard and exposure to COVID-19; (ii) vulnerability to COVID-19 impacts; and (iii) the capacity to cope, subject to an aid budget constraint. COVID-19 support from official donors to all ODA eligible countries
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Issue Information Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-10
No abstract is available for this article.
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Effects of extending residencies on the supply and quality of family medicine practitioners; difference-in-differences evidence from the implementation of mandatory family medicine residencies in Canada Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-03 Stephenson Strobel
I examine the impacts of extending residency training programs on the supply and quality of physicians practicing primary care. I leverage mandated extended residency lengths for primary care practitioners that were rolled out over 20 years in Canada on a province-by-province basis. I compare these primary care specialties to other specialties that did not change residency length (first difference)
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Vaccine-skeptic physicians and patient vaccination decisions Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Andreas Steinmayr, Manuel Rossi
What is the role of general practitioners (GPs) in supporting or hindering public health efforts? We investigate the influence of vaccine-skeptic GPs on their patients' decisions to get a COVID-19 vaccination. We identify vaccine-skeptic GPs from the signatories of an open letter in which 199 Austrian physicians expressed their skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines. We examine small rural municipalities
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On the short-term impact of pollution: The effect of PM 2.5 on emergency room visits Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Evangelina Dardati, Ramiro de Elejalde, Eugenio Giolito
In this paper, we study the short-term effect of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) exposure on respiratory emergency room (ER) visits in Chile, a middle-income country with high levels of air pollution. To instrument for PM 2.5, we use wind speed at different altitudes (pressure levels). Unlike previous papers, our data allow us to study the impact of high pollution levels across all age groups. We
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Why higher copayments for opioids did not reduce use among Medicare beneficiaries Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Geoffrey Joyce, Bo Zhou, Robert Kaestner
To examine whether higher cost-sharing deterred prescription opioid use. Medicare Part D claims from 2007 to 2016 for a 20% random sample of Medicare enrollees. We obtain estimates of the effect of cost-sharing on prescription opioid use using ordinary least squares and instrumental variables methods. In both, we exploit the variation (change) in cost-sharing within plans over time for a sample of
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Fast food proximity and weight gain in childhood and adolescence: Evidence from Great Britain Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Nicolás Libuy, David Church, George Ploubidis, Emla Fitzsimons
We study the relationship between proximity to fast food restaurants and weight gain from late childhood to early adolescence. We use the Millennium Cohort Study, a UK-wide nationally representative longitudinal study, linked with granular geocoded food outlet data to measure the presence of fast food outlets around children's homes and schools from ages 7 to 14. We find that proximity to fast food
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Lead exposure and student outcomes: A study of Flint schools Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Jessica Sauve-Syed
This paper estimates the impacts of cumulative lead exposure on the short-run discipline and academic achievement of elementary school students. An exogenous, heterogeneous shock of lead-in-water levels within classrooms at Flint Community Schools provides the treatment variation used to focus on the understudied, short-run effects of lead on older children. At the mean level of classroom lead exposure
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(No) time to be healthy: Optimal policy with time and monetary investments in health Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Justina Klimaviciute
Time is often an important ingredient of a healthy lifestyle. Starting from this observation, this paper studies optimal public policy concerned with promoting healthy choices taking into account both monetary and time investments in health. Individuals tend to underestimate the importance of their health while making decisions, which makes their investments too low compared to the first-best. While
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Issue Information Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-02
No abstract is available for this article.
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Going the extra mile? General practitioners' upcoding of fees for home visits Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Jamie O’Halloran, Anne Sophie Oxholm, Line Bjørnskov Pedersen, Dorte Gyrd-Hansen
General practitioners' (GPs') income often relies on self-reported activities and performances. They can therefore ‘game the system’ to maximize their remuneration. We investigate whether Danish GPs game their travel fees for home visits. Combining administrative and geographical data, we measure the difference between GPs' traveled and billed distances. We exploit a rise in the fees for home visits
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Trading HIV for sheep: Risky sexual behavior and the response of female sex workers to Tabaski in Senegal Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Henry Cust, Aurélia Lépine, Carole Treibich, Timothy Powell-Jackson, Rosalba Radice, Cheikh Tidiane Ndour
We use a cohort of female sex workers (FSWs) in Senegal to show how large anticipated economic shocks lead to increased risky sexual behavior. Exploiting the exogenous timing of interviews, we study the effect of Tabaski, the most important Islamic festival celebrated in Senegal, in which most households purchase an expensive animal for sacrifice. Condom use, measured robustly via the list experiment
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I wish I were born in another time: Unintended consequences of immigration enforcement on birth outcomes Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Hoa Vu
This paper studies the effects of Secure Communities (SC), a wide-ranging immigration enforcement program, on infant health outcomes in the United States. Using administrative birth certificate data together with event study and triple-differences designs, I find that SC increases the incidence of very low birth weight by 21% for infants of foreign-born Hispanic mothers, who were most likely to be
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Financial incentives and health provider behaviour: Evidence from a capitation policy in Ghana Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Adolf Kwadzo Dzampe, Shingo Takahashi
The capitation payment model has been used as a supply-side cost-containment tool in controlling physician behaviour. However, little is known regarding its effectiveness in controlling costs and discouraging use of low-value care. This study seeks to examine whether financial incentives in capitation influence provider behaviour, and if so, whether such behaviour compromises outcomes for inpatients
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How does a ban on sex-selective abortions affect child health? Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Aparajita Dasgupta, Anisha Sharma
Bans on sex-selective abortions are typically implemented to make sex ratios more equitable, but they may have adverse effects on surviving children. We examine the impacts of a ban on prenatal sex selection in India on postnatal health outcomes. We first show that the ban increased the share of female children born to mothers, especially among firstborn female families. Strikingly, we also find that
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Naturalization and immigrants' health Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Ainoa Aparicio Fenoll
The “healthy immigrant effect” refers to the well-documented fact that immigrants are healthier than natives upon arrival, but their health level converges to that of natives over time. Unfortunately, we know little about whether environmental, institutional, or selective return migration mechanisms are behind the convergence. In this paper, I test whether immigrants' naturalization influences health
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The effect of gun buy-back law reform on homicides and suicides in Australia Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Patrick Duenow, Luke B. Connelly
In this paper we use the synthetic control method (SCM) to estimate the causal effects of a national legislative reform accompanied by mandatory gun buy-backs in Australia on both suicide and homicide rates. Using a rich international dataset, we are able to separate not only these two death types, but also to distinguish deaths by firearm and by other means, thereby enabling us to test substitution-of-means
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The impact of integrated care on health care utilization and costs in a socially deprived urban area in Germany: A difference-in-differences approach within an event-study framework Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Vanessa Ress, Eva-Maria Wild
We investigated the impact of an integrated care initiative in a socially deprived urban area in Germany. Using administrative data, we empirically assessed the causal effect of its two sub-interventions, which differed by the extent to which their instruments targeted the supply and demand side of healthcare provision. We addressed confounding using propensity score matching via the Super Learner
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The effect of prescription drug insurance on the incidence of potentially inappropriate prescribing: Evidence from Medicare Part D Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-21 Donghoon Lee, SangJune Kim, Jerome A. Dugan
The Medicare Part D program has been documented to increase the affordability and accessibility of drugs and improve the quality of prescription drug use; however, less is known about the equity impact of the Part D program on potentially inappropriate prescribing—specifically, incidences of polypharmacy and potentially inappropriate medication (PIM) use based on different racial/ethnic groups. Using
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Conditional cash transfers and women's reproductive choices Health Econ. (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Sonia Laszlo, Muhammad Farhan Majid, Laëtitia Renée
We study potential non-targeted effects of a large-scale national conditional cash transfer program—Peru's Juntos—on the fertility and reproductive decisions of adult beneficiaries. We use an event study design, exploiting time and geographic variation in the rollout of the program, to identify the causal effects of the program. We find that Juntos decreases the number of children that adult beneficiaries