Download or read book Essays in Health Economics Understanding Risky Health Behaviors written by Abigail Sarah Friedman and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation presents three papers applying health economics to the study of risky behaviors. The first uses data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the relationship between adverse events and risky behaviors among adolescents. Substance use responses to experiencing either of two adverse events--violent crime victimization or death of a non-family member one felt close to--explain 6.7 percent of first cigarette use, and 14.3 percent of first use of illegal drugs other than marijuana. Analyses of exercise, a positive coping mechanism, find shock-responses consistent with a coping-response, but not with rational, time-inconsistent, or non-rational drivers considered here. I conclude that distressing events lead to risky behaviors, with a coping response contributing to this effect.

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 and Health Behaviors written by Daniel Sebastian Tello-Trillo and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Health and Risky Behavior written by Markus Gehrsitz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Health Behaviors written by Kai-Wen Cheng and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Women s Risky Health Behavior written by Eva Rye Johansen 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 Three Essays in Health Economics written by Anna Choi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays in the field of health economics and health policy. The first essay studies the effects of legalizing medical use of marijuana on marijuana use and other risky health behaviors. I examine the restricted-use data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which is a repeated cross sectional data set with state identifiers from 2004 to 2012. During this period, 9 states and Washington D.C. allowed patients with medical conditions to use marijuana. I estimate difference-in-differences (DID) models to examine the impacts of these policy changes on risky health behaviors. Allowing medical use of marijuana does not lead to higher marijuana use among the overall population and the youth. However, I find that medical marijuana laws (MMLs) are positively and significantly associated with marijuana use among males and heavy pain reliever users. The second essay is a joint work with John Cawley and tests a novel hypothesis: that these health disparities across education are to some extent due to differences in reporting error across education. We use data from the pooled National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) Continuous for 1999-2012, which include both self-reports and objective verification for an extensive set of health behaviors and conditions, including smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes. We find that better educated individuals report their health behaviors more accurately. This is true for a wide range of behaviors and conditions, even socially stigmatized ones like smoking and obesity. We show that the differential reporting error across education leads to underestimates of the true health disparities across education that average 19.3%. The third essay is a joint work with Rachel Dunifon and studies how state regulations related to the quality of child care centers-such as teachers' education and degree requirements, staff to child ratios, maximum group size, and unannounced inspection compliance requirement-are predictive of children's health, developmental and cognitive outcomes. State level policies that are related to improving the productivity of child care center teachers by having a higher staff to child ratios and advanced schooling requirement are predictive of child's weight related outcomes and cognitive outcomes.

Download or read book Essays in Health Economics written by Anna Elizabeth Hill and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My first essay examines the relationship between medical innovation and moral hazard. I examine the behavioral response to one recent medical innovation: the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. I use both medical claims and survey data to observe a comprehensive set of variables indicating risky behavior. I use instrumental variables and regression discontinuity designs to account for selection into vaccination and to determine the causal effect of receiving the vaccine on behavior and I find evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects. Results indicate that receiving the vaccine leads to moral hazard in low income adolescents; however the vaccine leads to a reduction in risky behavior in the overall population. My second essay is joint work with John Cawley. We use the American Time Use Survey to examine socioeconomic differences in waiting times. Socioeconomic characteristics are correlated with waiting time for medical care. Low income and publicly insured individuals wait longer than higher income groups and those with private coverage. It could be that lower income respondents are getting care without an appointment or that they experience a lower opportunity cost of time than high income respondents and are therefore showing up earlier to appointments. My third essay is also joint work with John Cawley, we examine the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and health. The majority of previous work on the relationship between economic conditions and health focuses on three categories of outcomes: mortality, health and wellbeing measures and health behaviors. We contribute to the large body of empirical work on the relationship between iii macroeconomic conditions and health by examining a range of behaviors via the American Time Use Survey that provide evidence about both the local labor market effect on the opportunity cost of time-intensive health investments. These health-related behaviors provide evidence about the mechanisms driving the relationship between the macroeconomy and health outcomes. We find that time spent in transit is reduced when the local unemployment rate increases and time spent sleeping increases. We also find mixed evidence on diet and exercise-related activities as well as risky behaviors. iv.

Download or read book Essays in Behavioral Health Economics written by Juan Carlos Cantu Montoy and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three chapters, each of which contributes to the fields of health economics and psychology & economics. Two of the chapters investigate how choice architecture affects patients health care decisions. The third investigates the role of beliefs in the demand for health information. The underlying motivation for these studies stems from the observations that the proportion of HIV-infected persons in the United States who are undiagnosed has remained constant for over a decade, and those who are diagnosed are often diagnosed late in the course of their disease. Deeper understanding of how HIV test acceptance by patients depends on how the test is offered has the potential to decrease the frequency of missed opportunities for identifying infected persons. Choice architecture has the potential to influence patients' health and health care deci- sions. In particular, decisions with significant but delayed consequences can be very sensitive to small, immediate costs and benefits. I investigate how small monetary incentives and de- fault test policies affect patient decision making with regard to HIV testing. I conduct and analyze the results of a field experiment that takes place in an urban emergency depart- ment (ED). In parallel with routine care, patients are approached by research assistants and offered HIV tests and questionnaires according to treatment assignments. In a factorial design, patients are randomly assigned to be offered HIV tests according to default scripts; they are also offered small monetary incentives and a questionnaire eliciting HIV-related risk behaviors. Patients are offered the questionnaire either before or after the test offer. Among those assigned to an early questionnaire, half are assigned to an additional question asking whether they would hypothetically accept an HIV test, a f̀oot-in-the-door' question (FITD). In Chapter 1, "HIV Screening: To Test or Not to Test? It Depends on the Question," I examine three test defaults: traditional opt-in (test only those patients who request test- ing), opt-out (routine testing unless patients decline), and active-choice testing (patients are required to state whether they want to be tested). I find a test acceptance rate of 51.2% in the opt-in treatment. Active-choice and opt-out test schemes increased the proportion of patients who accepted HIV testing by clinically significant levels. Patients assigned to an active-choice test offer are 9.5 percentage points more likely to accept an HIV test; those assigned to an opt-out offer are 18.2 percentage points more likely than opt-in patients. I take up the issue of monetary incentives in "Conditional Cash Incentives for HIV Test- ing." Patients are offered monetary incentives ($0, $1, $5, $10), which vary by ED zone (four zones) by day. I find that cash incentives of $5 and $10 increase test acceptance rates by 11.7 and 12.8 percentage points, respectively, from a baseline of 57.9% with no incentive. The $1 treatment assignment has no significant effect on overall test rates. It does, however, have a differential effect on high- and low-risk patients: patients reporting HIV risk factors are 4.3 percentage points more likely to test when offered $1 than when offered no incentive, and patients denying any risk factors are 9.6 percentage points less likely to accept testing when offered $1 than when offered no incentive. I find no difference in test rates between patients assigned to the FITD treatment and those in the early questionnaire treatment who were not asked the hypothetical question. Across defaults and monetary incentives, I observe an effect of being offered a questionnaire: patients assigned to either of Early or FITD questionnaires are 10.8 percentage points less likely to accept testing than those who are offered the test prior to being offered the questionnaire. In "Perceptions and Misperceptions of HIV Transmission, Testing, and Treatment" I examine the relationship between beliefs regarding HIV transmission, testing, and treatment on subjects' testing behavior. I find that subjects grossly overestimate the probability of transmission for both real (e.g., injection drug use) and false (e.g., sharing a beverage) risk behaviors. Subjects also overestimate the prevalence of HIV. Despite these overestimates and self-reported risk behaviors, most consider themselves to be at no or very low risk of HIV infection, and few have ever tested for HIV. While these findings support both classical and behavioral interpretations (including psychological expected utility), these findings suggest that people's beliefs regarding HIV risk are biased and suggest that educating the public might be counterproductive, leading to more risky behaviors and lower testing rates.

Download or read book Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty written by Kinga Posadzy and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.

Download or read book Risky Behavior among Youths written by Jonathan Gruber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day young people engage in risky behaviors that affect not only their immediate well-being but their long-term health and safety. These well-honed essays apply diverse economic analyses to a wide range of unsafe activities, including teen drinking and driving, smoking, drug use, unprotected sex, and criminal activity. Economic principles are further applied to mental health and performance issues such as teenage depression, suicide, nutritional disorders, and high school dropout rates. Together, the essays yield notable findings: price and regulatory incentives are critical determinants of high-risk behavior, suggesting that youths do apply some sort of cost/benefit calculation when making decisions; the macroeconomic environment in which those decisions are made matters greatly; and youths who pursue high-risk behaviors are significantly more likely to engage in similar behaviors as adults. This important volume provides both a key data source for public policy makers and a clear affirmation of the usefulness of economic analysis to our understanding of risky behavior.

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by Touchanun Komonpaisarn and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three studies in the field of health economics. The first chapter studies the market situation of the U.S. nursing home industry. It uses the most recent data available from the Annual Survey of Nursing Homes conducted in Wisconsin. In this study, we derive theoretical predictions from an optimization problem of a representative nursing home under various assumptions. We introduce a new measure, a home's bed-utilization rate, in our empirical strategy and find evidence of excess demand from Medicaid patients in Wisconsin. A positive relationship between Medicaid payment rates and private-pay prices is found in homes with high bed utilization. Additionally, we find strong adverse effects of higher reimbursement rates on quality measures. These findings prove there is an excess demand from Medicaid patients in Wisconsin. This conclusion has direct implications for the quality of care that a nursing home provides for its patients. The second study takes advantage of the "natural experiment" features of the major health care reform in Thailand in 2002 in order to estimate the price elasticity of health care demand among Thai citizens. We use the difference-in-difference technique to capture the pure effect of the reform on the health care utilization behavior of those who were directly affected by the reform. In order to capture any secular trend in health care utilization, we use data from a group of people who were not affected by the reform. We find that the reduction in health care price immediately induced those who lacked health insurance coverage to increase their visits to a public health care facility, although similar trends were not found a few years after the reform. The estimated change in visits is used to calculate the price elasticity of demand, which falls in the range of -1.36 to -0.58. The last study examines the relationship between risky behaviors among Americans aged 50-65 and their health insurance coverage. Despite the fact that moral hazard behaviors are predicted by economic theory, the study finds that health insurance has no significant effect on certain risky behaviors such as smoking. Surprisingly, we find a significantly positive relationship between health insurance coverage and healthy behaviors such as exercising regularly. This finding reflects the importance of health insurance companies in providing its customers with more health information that could encourage health-oriented attitudes.

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Health Risk and Behavior written by Adam A. Leive and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second chapter investigates how status affects health by comparing mortality between Gold and Silver medalists in Olympic Track and Field. Contrary to conventional wisdom, winners die over two years earlier than losers. Analysis of individual Census records of each athlete and his parents suggests that income is the key mechanism: losers pursued higher-paying occupations than winners after the Olympics, while parental earnings in childhood were similar. An athlete’s performance relative to expectations plays an auxiliary role, but is much less important than income. The results suggest that how people respond to pivotal life events can produce long-lasting consequences for health.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Health Behaviors and Outcomes written by Cameron M. Kaplan and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final chapter examines the effect asthma and other chronic childhood illnesses on standardized test scores, absenteeism, and grade repetition. I find that asthma is related to significant increases in absenteeism and grade retention, but not to differences in standardized test scores.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Economics written by Mojisola O. A. Tayo and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays examining topics in health economics. The first essay examines the impact of education on 10-year mortality rates of minorities in the United States. I use the states' compulsory education laws to instrument the level of education in my cohort study of the effect of education on the mortality rates of minority groups (Blacks, Asians and Hispanics) born in the early twentieth century. I find that an increase in years of education significantly decreases the mortality rates for the White and Black populations, but not for the Asian and Hispanic populations. The second essay explores the effect of education on adult self-reported health (SRH), health behaviors (smoking, seatbelt use, and exercise), and health outcomes (body mass index (BMI), hypertension, and heart attack) by race and ethnicity using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data from 2001-2011. I find racial and ethnic disparities in the education gradient on SRH that remain significant after controlling for income and other economic factors. I explore the pathway through which education influences health using three different econometric methods to estimate a causal effect. I find that education directly affects health behaviors and that health behaviors directly affect health outcomes including SRH, leading to an indirect impact of education on SRH. My third essay is written in collaboration with my adviser, Dr. Virginia Wilcox-Gok. We use the National Comorbidity Survey Baseline (NCS-1) dataset from 1990-1992 and O*NET (Occupational Information Network) to explore whether individuals diagnosed with depression before age 22 self-select as adults into occupations that accommodate their depressive disorders. Depressive disorder is a health problem that can start very early on in life, so it often limits educational attainment and adult earning. It is also a disorder that can be helped if diagnosed early. Because individuals with chronic depression may need more flexibility and less stress in the workplace to cope with their disorder, their adult occupational choice may depend on how accommodating the occupation's characteristics are to this disorder. We find that women with early-onset depressive disorder are more likely to be employed full time than men, while both men and women are likely to choose self-employment. Men with more frequent depressive episodes are less likely than women to choose occupations requiring higher levels of education, experience, and training. In contrast, women with early onset depressive disorder are more likely than men to take jobs in the service sector.

Download or read book Complementarities and Substitutes in the Production of Health written by Michael Lee Ganz and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Economics written by Christopher Roby and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on how changes in an economic environment can affect an individual's decision making. I assess how individuals respond to different rules and regulations which are meant to alter behavior and the implications therein. I address this problem by looking at response to information that affects competitive choices, group coordination in the face of losses, and risky behaviors for teenagers in response to a legal barrier for smoking.