Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Mental Health and Well being written by Anna Bencsik and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Mental Health written by Ellis Q. Magee and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One in five adults in the United States experiences mental illness in a typical year. Less than half get treatment. The novel coronavirus pandemic has increased mental health pressures above that baseline. This dissertation addresses the intersection between mental health and economic issues building upon two important findings: (1) the economic finding of a bidirectional causal relationship between mental health and economic outcomes and (2) the psychiatric finding that mental-wellness-focused smartphone applications (apps) are effective. Mental wellness apps are low-cost, scalable, and pandemic-appropriate, but current use is limited. Given the relationship between mental health and economic outcomes and the efficacy of mental wellness apps, can we leverage mental wellness apps to improve economic outcomes? The first two chapters of this dissertation report on my randomized controlled trials testing strategies to expand usage of mental wellness apps. First, I find providing mental-wellness-app privacy ratings increases selection of privacy-preferred apps by six percentage points among likely app users, a significant shift that could drive competitive pressures toward improved privacy protections. Likely app users care about this issue and are willing to pay one third of the average monthly app price to access the ratings, suggesting $80 million in social welfare gains from implementing privacy ratings nationally. Second, among individuals willing to download apps, I find offering $3 for downloading, installing, and using a mental wellness app for two weeks does not have significant mental wellbeing or work productivity impacts on my sample as a whole. Instead, high-productivity individuals see productivity increases of 0.127 standard deviations, worth $20 per high-productivity participant over the measured second week of treatment. However, low-productivity participants experience no change or negative changes in productivity as a result of the intervention. Taken together, these findings suggest further research is necessary to clarify the conditions under which workplace use of mental wellness apps is beneficial before broadly implementing similar incentive schemes. Third, I investigate the presence and impacts of gender-identity-related social stigma on health and work outcomes using Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I find transgender status is associated with poorer mental and physical health and controlling for mental and physical health status and demographic characteristics, transgender Americans experience poorer work outcomes than similarly situated cisgender (that is, not transgender) Americans, by about $10,000 per year. This outcome is not the result of using stigmatized health behaviors, as after controlling for adverse childhood experiences, transgender people use no more stigmatized health behaviors than their cisgender peers. Mental wellbeing is a key component of individual and social welfare and human capital. This dissertation investigates the intersection between mental health and economics, a promising and important area for economic research.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Mental Illness and Belief Formation written by Matthew White Ridley (Scientist in economics) and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 study questions relating to the economics of mental illness, while Chapter 3 contributes to the literature on the behavioral economics of belief formation. The first chapter studies why people who live in poverty are disproportionately affected by mental illness. Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach, Vikram Patel and I review the interdisciplinary evidence of the bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and common mental illnesses---depression and anxiety---and the underlying mechanisms. Our review shows that mental illness reduces employment and therefore income and that psychological interventions generate economic gains. Similarly, negative economic shocks cause mental illness, and anti-poverty programs, such as cash transfers, improve mental health. A crucial step toward the design of effective policies is to better understand the mechanisms underlying these causal effects. In the second chapter, I study discrimination against people with common mental illnesses in labor market settings -- one important mechanism through which mental illness may (indirectly) cause lower employment and income. In an online experiment, I find that people pay to avoid depressed or anxious coworkers in a simple communication-based problem-solving task---paying as much to avoid them as they do to work with the college-educated. A model of earnings-maximizing statistical discrimination with correct beliefs cannot explain these preferences: depressed or anxious coworkers are equally productive when exogenously assigned. Instead, I find evidence that discrimination is driven by incorrect beliefs about such coworkers as well as an increase in costly effort when working with them. A major motivation for tackling discrimination is often to encourage revelation of mental illness (thereby perhaps improving access to treatment or support); however, I find that people pay to hide mental illness in my setting even when insulated from rejection or any financial consequence of discrimination. In the third chapter of my thesis, John Conlon, Malavika Mani, Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach and I study social learning between spouses using an experiment in Chennai, India. We vary whether individuals discover information themselves or must instead learn what their spouse discovered via a discussion. Women treat their `own' and their husband's information the same. In sharp contrast, men's beliefs respond less than half as much to information that was discovered by their wife. This is not due to a lack of communication: husbands put less weight on their wife's signals even when perfectly informed of them. In a second experiment, when paired with mixed- and same-gender strangers, both men and women heavily discount their teammate's information relative to their own. We conclude that people have a tendency to underweight others' information relative to their own. The marital context creates a countervailing force for women, resulting in a gender difference in learning (only) in the household.

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Child Mental Health written by A. Bowen Garrett and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Mental Health and Social Interactions written by Matthew Daniel Lang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third chapter examines the implications of incorporating altruism into networks. When players act altruistically, the number of possible efficient graphs increases. In a perfectly altruistic network, the efficient networks will always be stable, although increasing altruism does not monotonically decrease the tension between stable and efficient networks. These results are shown in detail using a four-player network, however the main results hold for a network of any size.

Download or read book Essays in Health Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in health economics related issues. In the first chapter, I estimated health insurance expansion's effects on young adults' employment using MEPS. In 2010 young adults were allowed to stay on their parent's health insurance plan until the age of 26 by a policy change under the ACA. I used a difference-in-differences model to estimate labor supply effects of this policy on young adults. 23-25-year-olds are in the treatment group, and 26-30-year-olds are in the control group. Additionally, I estimated heterogeneity of the policy's labor supply effect by socio-economic groups. I found that extensive and intensive labor supply decreased among males. The effect is greater among men in higher socio-economic group. In the second chapter, I analyzed whether internet use has an effect on patients' mental health using BRFSS data. Over the last decade internet use has become universal. It provides various health related tools and information sources which may affect patients' distress levels in several ways, and health related distress can have large impacts on quality of life. I used variation across states' "right of way" policies during the broadband boom period of 2001-2005. Using rights of way rules' easiness as a proxy for broadband penetration rates, I investigated whether patients' mental health levels changed differently in states with more lenient rights of way rules. I found that among men internet use improves patients' mental health. In the third chapter, I studied labor market effects of the early Medicaid expansions under the ACA in 2010 using data from Current Population Survey. The ACA extends public insurance coverage to low income childless adults, yet we know very little about the effect of a public health insurance extension on childless adults' labor supply. The ACA allowed states to extend Medicaid and a number of states opted in early and extended Medicaid in 2010. I utilized this variation among states to evaluate whether the policy had any effect on childless adults' employment. I found that the policy had no effect on labor supply of the overall population. I found evidence that the policy mainly affected near-retirement-aged childless

Download or read book Essays on the Socio economic Determinants of Mental Health written by Christoph Kronenberg and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Light Libation and the Parsing of Health written by Nathan W. Tefft and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Economics of Youth Mental Health written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Economics written by Keisha T. Solomon and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation covers three loosely related topics in health and education economics that focus on examining factors that may affect children's and young adults' health capital and human capital accumulation. The first essay examines the effect of state-level full parity mental illness law implementation on mental illness among college-aged individuals and human capital accumulation in college. It is important to consider spill-overs to these educational outcomes, as previous research shows that mental illness impedes college performance. I utilize administrative data on completed suicides and grade point average, and survey data on reported mental illness days and decision to drop-out of college between 1998 and 2008 in differences-in-differences (DD) analysis to uncover causal effects of state-level parity laws. Following the passage of a state-level full parity law, I find that the suicide rate reduces, the propensity to report any poor mental health day reduces, college GPA increases, and the propensity to drop out of college does not change. The second essay investigates the effects of family size on child health. This essay is a joint study with Kabir Dasgupta. In this study, we use matched mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Surveys to study the effects of family size on child health. Focusing on excess body weight indicators as children's health outcome of interest, we examine the effects of exogenous variations in family size generated by twin births and parental preference for mixed sex composition of their children. We find no significant empirical support in favor of the quantity-quality trade-off theory in instrumental variable regression analysis. This result is further substantiated when we make use of the panel aspects of the data to study child health outcomes of arrival of younger siblings at later parities. The third essay estimates the causal effect of being born out of wedlock on a child's health outcome and early academic achievements. Specifically, the study uses rich panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the Children of the NLSY79 (NLSY79-child), coupled with a sibling fixed-effects model to address omitted variable bias attributable to unobserved family characteristics. The study findings suggest that the results from the OLS models have been driven by unobserved family effects, because the significance of the results disappear for the sibling fixed-effects models. Also, due to the large confidence intervals, and the signs changing for some of the regression coefficients, I cannot conclusively state whether being born to a married mother has no significant impact on children's health and education.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Health Economics written by Tarso Mori Madeira and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of two chapters. Each chapter presents a study testing a theory from behavioral economics in a health economics setting using field data. The first chapter studies the role of present bias in the choice of health insurance. I analyze the consequences of a policy change that removes deadlines for enrollment in high-quality (5-star) Medicare drug coverage plans (Part D), while maintaining existing deadlines for enrollment in all other plans. Although the goals of the policy were to increase enrollment in 5-star plans and to provide incentives for insurers to improve quality, the removal of deadlines might lead to the opposite. First, rational beneficiaries might wait to enroll in 5-star plans only when a negative health event occurs, which would both decrease enrollment and increase adverse selection. Second, without deadlines, present-biased beneficiaries might procrastinate, which would also lead to a drop in enrollment, driven by an overall increase in inertia. I develop a model to examine these different hypotheses and test its predictions using Medicare administrative micro data for the period of 2009-2012. I employ a difference-in-differences design within a differentiated-product discrete-choice demand framework. My identification strategy takes advantage of the fact that the policy did not actually change enrollment rules everywhere in the United States, as most counties were not within the coverage area of a 5-star provider in 2012, the year the policy was implemented. I have three main findings. First, the policy backfires: it decreases enrollment in the Part D program by 2.55pp from a baseline of 51.76\%, and decreases average market share of 5-star plans by 1.37pp from a baseline of 7.78\%. Second, the policy does not seem to impact adverse selection, suggesting the rational model might not fully account for the results. Third, the removal of deadlines leads to a drop in the probability that a previously enrolled beneficiary switches plans of 3.18pp (baseline 9.08\%), suggesting that at least some Medicare beneficiaries are present-biased. The second chapter studies role of projection bias in mental health treatment decisions. Evidence from psychology suggests that on a bad-weather day, individuals may feel more depressed than usual. If people are not fully able to account for the effect of transient weather, they may take systematically biased treatment decisions. I derive a model of a person considering treatment for depression and show that when projection bias is present, transient weather might influence choice. I use detailed administrative medical records from the MarketScan \textregistered database and daily county-level meteorological data from the National Climatic Data Center. My period of analysis is 01/01/2003 through 12/31/2004. My main analysis focuses on patient behavior during a small interval of time after they have been seen by a physician. I look at how weather influences antidepressant filling decision within patient and only include appointments that involved a major diagnosis of a mental disease or disorder. I find that a one standard deviation increase in the amount of cloud coverage (2.73 oktas) leads to a 0.063 percentage point increase in the probability that a patient fills an antidepressant prescription on appointment day. That is a 1.04\% increase from the 6.07\% baseline. I also find effects associated with snow, rain, and temperature. All effects fade with time and are not significant within seven days of the appointment. Most of the impact of cloud coverage on antidepressant filling is due to an increase on the number of new prescriptions, not an increase in refills. Virtually all the effect happens at the pharmacy, not via mail order. Most regions have similar coefficients associated with cloud coverage, with stronger results in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Finally, most of the impact happens during Winter.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Investments in Health written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Risky Health Behaviors written by Sharmini Radakrishnan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay in my dissertation investigates the impact of a state policy designed to reduce substance abuse. Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are state-run electronic databases that track the prescribing and dispensing of controlled substances. I examine the impact of PDMP implementation on various measures of opioid pain reliever abuse. I estimate difference-in-differences models, and address possible policy endogeneity by controlling for pre-implementation trends and related state laws. The preferred estimates suggest that PDMPs reduced opioid abuse treatment admissions by 13.1%. However I cannot reject the null hypothesis that PDMPs had no effect on self-reported nonmedical use and overdose deaths. The second essay investigates the relationship between parental job loss and child health outcomes. I use data on parental job displacement and child health outcomes from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Parental displacement results in a drop in family income and employer-provided health insurance, which is only partially offset by an increase in public and privately-purchased insurance. I find that parental job displacement is associated with a significantly lower likelihood of mental illness diagnosis, and a higher likelihood of ever drinking and using marijuana. I do not find significant effects of displacement on depressive symptoms, health status, and smoking. The third essay is joint work with John Cawley and Joseph Price. This paper investigates one possible determinant of physical activity: the success of local sports teams. We hypothesize that individuals living in an area with a successful local sports team will be more likely to engage in that sport as a result of role model or bandwagon effects. We merge individual U.S. data from the Simmons National Consumer Survey with data on sports team performance for a variety of sports at the professional and college level. We estimate ordered probit models of participation in a particular sport as a function of local sports team success, with controls for demographics as well as fixed effects of time and geographic area. We find some evidence that children are more likely to participate in sport when local teams perform well, and find weaker evidence of such a relationship for teens.

Download or read book Essays on Health Economics written by Tzu-Yin Hazel Tseng and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation consists of two applied health economics studies on early childhood environment and the short- and long-term health outcomes. The first study uses detailed birth registries and health insurance claims records from Taiwan to examine the effects of exposure to adverse events while in utero on pregnancy outcomes. My coauthors and I study the impact of the 1999 Taiwan earthquake on fetal mortality and pregnancy outcomes. We compare the pregnancy outcomes of women who resided in areas with high earthquake intensity (i.e., higher on the Seismic scale) to those who resided in areas with low earthquake intensity, and compare pregnancies that were exposed to the earthquake to those pregnancies that were not exposed to the earthquake. Our results suggest that the incidence of fetal mortality increases by 4.4 and 3.2 percent for those who have in utero exposure to the earthquake in the most earthquake-affected regions during the first and second trimesters, respectively. We find that almost all of the losses that occur during first-trimester exposure are due to the loss of male fetuses. The second study explores the relationship between early childhood environment and mental health later in life. I examine the impact on psychological well-being later in life of poor intrauterine environment caused by severe typhoons that took place in Taiwan. By exploiting time and regional variation, I compare the mental health of individuals who were exposed to severe typhoons while in utero in landfall counties to those who had no fetal exposure to severe typhoons. I find that the likelihood of mental disorders in adulthood resulting from fetal exposure to severe typhoons increased by 11. Exposed individuals are also more likely to use psychiatric drugs and have more psychiatric-related healthcare utilization. The effects are most prominent for women. My results suggest that natural disasters could have adverse impacts beyond infant health and adult physical health.

Download or read book ESSAYS IN HEALTH ECONOMICS written by Thanh Lu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation comprises three chapters that use applied econometric techniques to answer policy-related questions, particularly those that have implications for behavioral health. In the first and second chapters, I study the unintended consequences of public policies on behavioral health outcomes. In the last chapter, I study local access to mental health care providers on juvenile arrests. In the first chapter, I study state-imposed payday lending bans on suicide, fatal drug overdoses, and fatal alcohol poisoning over the period 1999 to 2016. Payday lenders oer \quick cash" and charge high fees relative to the principle loan amounts. I combine the restricted-use National Center for Health Statistics Multiple Cause of Death Files coupled with state policy changes using two-way fixed effects regression. My estimates show that restricting access to payday loans reduces suicide rate by 2.1 percent and fatal drug overdoses rate by 8.9 percent. My findings suggest that restricting access to payday loans can reduce suicides and deaths linked to substance misuse. In the second chapter, I investigate the effect of recent legalization of recreational marijuana use (RMLs) on household spending on food and alcohol over the period 2005 to 2018. Utilizing expenditure as a proxy for consumption, I combine data from the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey coupled with state policy changes using two-way fixed effects regression. I find, post legalization, quarterly household expenditure on total food spending is increased, driven mainly by spending on food consumed away from home. I also document an increase in spending on alcohol following the recreational marijuana legalization (RML). These findings suggest that food/alcohol and marijuana are complements. In the third chapter, my coauthors and I estimate the effect of local access to office-based mental healthcare on juvenile arrests. We leverage variation in the number of mental healthcare offices within a county over the period 1999 to 2016 in a two-way fixed effects model. We find that increasing the number of mental healthcare offices modestly reduces juvenile arrests for violent crimes. Given crime and incarceration impose substantial costs on society and interventions during early life can have more pronounced effects, our results imply increased access to mental health care treatment may have an unintended benefitt.

Download or read book Essays in Health Economics written by Dan Wei and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Health Economics written by Eric Scott Wilkinson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I study three issues in the field of health economics. Chapter 1, ``The Effect of Internet Gambling Laws on Suicide: Evidence From New Jersey,'' examines the effect of legalizing Internet gambling on suicide rates following the introduction of legal Internet gambling in New Jersey. The emergence and subsequent rapid growth of Internet gambling has raised significant public health questions and concerns. The relationship between Internet gambling and pathological gambling has been studied extensively. However, the link between them is not well understood. This study exploits a change in the legal status of Internet gambling to estimate the effects of Internet gambling on state level suicide rates using both a differences-in-differences model and a synthetic control model. I find no statistically significant effect of the law on suicides. Secondary analyses using Internet search data find evidence of an effect on mental health and addiction. These results are important because they show that, once endogenous correlation in Internet gambling participation is controlled for, the effects of its legalization on public health may diminish. This is in sharp contrast to the heft of existing literature and may help to better understand the link between Internet gambling and pathological gambling. Chapter 2, ``The Effect of Increased Cost-Sharing on Low-value Service Use,'' examines the effect of a value-based insurance design (VBID) program implemented at a large public employer in the state of Oregon. The program substantially increased cost-sharing for several healthcare services likely to be of low-value for most patients: diagnostic services (e.g., imaging services) and surgeries (e.g., spinal surgeries for pain). Using a differences-in-differences design coupled with granular, administrative health insurance claims data over the period 2008 to 2013, we estimate the change in low-value service use among beneficiaries before and after program implementation relative to a comparison group not exposed to the VBID. Our findings suggest that the VBID significantly reduced the use of targeted services, with implied elasticities of demand somewhat larger than estimates for general healthcare services. We find no evidence that increasing cost-sharing for these low-value services led to substitution to non-targeted services or increased overall healthcare costs. These findings have implications for both public and private healthcare policies as VBID principles are proliferating in United States healthcare markets. Chapter 3, ``The Effect of Mandatory Managed Care on Preventable Hospitalizations for the Aged, Blind, and Disabled Population of Medicaid in New Jersey,'' examines the effect of a mandatory transition to Medicaid managed care for the aged, blind, and disabled population in New Jersey Medicaid. Medicaid has grown over the last few decades to a program which now covers one in five Americans and costs over half of one trillion dollars to administer. Medicaid represents the largest item on a state's budget; the largest share of that money is spent on a small group of high-cost individuals: the disabled. Seeking to expand upon the successes, no mater how limited, and the ability to smooth costs over time, states began to shift these high-cost, complex patients into managed care plans. The evidence on how well these plans can handle the demanding needs of this population is still debated. In this paper, I utilize the variation induced from a shift to mandatory managed care in preventable hospitalizations for the physically and developmentally disabled in New Jersey's Medicaid program to asses the impact on access to care for this extremely vulnerable population. Using a difference-in-differences model I find the introduction of managed care reduced the monthly preventable hospitalization rate 6.4%[-11.5,-1.3]. To my knowledge, this would be one of the first causal estimates for this population, and the first for New Jersey.