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 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 Mental Health and the Economy written by Louis A. Ferman and published by Kalamazoo, Mich. : W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. This book was released on 1979 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compilation of conference paper on mental health and mental stress as a function of general economic conditions, structural unemployment and redundancy - reviews social theory concerning working conditions, work environment, etc. In relation to the changing economy, provides guidelines to establish specific methodology and new directions for social research, and considers policy implications. Graphs, models, references and statistical tables. Conference held in hunt valley 1978 jun.
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 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 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 Encyclopedia of Health Economics written by and published by Newnes. This book was released on 2014-02-21 with total page 1663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Health Economics offers students, researchers and policymakers objective and detailed empirical analysis and clear reviews of current theories and polices. It helps practitioners such as health care managers and planners by providing accessible overviews into the broad field of health economics, including the economics of designing health service finance and delivery and the economics of public and population health. This encyclopedia provides an organized overview of this diverse field, providing one trusted source for up-to-date research and analysis of this highly charged and fast-moving subject area. Features research-driven articles that are objective, better-crafted, and more detailed than is currently available in journals and handbooks Combines insights and scholarship across the breadth of health economics, where theory and empirical work increasingly come from non-economists Provides overviews of key policies, theories and programs in easy-to-understand language
Download or read book Mental Health written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Social Determinants of Mental Health written by Michael T. Compton and published by American Psychiatric Pub. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Social Determinants of Mental Health aims to fill the gap that exists in the psychiatric, scholarly, and policy-related literature on the social determinants of mental health: those factors stemming from where we learn, play, live, work, and age that impact our overall mental health and well-being. The editors and an impressive roster of chapter authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds provide detailed information on topics such as discrimination and social exclusion; adverse early life experiences; poor education; unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity; income inequality, poverty, and neighborhood deprivation; food insecurity; poor housing quality and housing instability; adverse features of the built environment; and poor access to mental health care. This thought-provoking book offers many beneficial features for clinicians and public health professionals: Clinical vignettes are included, designed to make the content accessible to readers who are primarily clinicians and also to demonstrate the practical, individual-level applicability of the subject matter for those who typically work at the public health, population, and/or policy level. Policy implications are discussed throughout, designed to make the content accessible to readers who work primarily at the public health or population level and also to demonstrate the policy relevance of the subject matter for those who typically work at the clinical level. All chapters include five to six key points that focus on the most important content, helping to both prepare the reader with a brief overview of the chapter's main points and reinforce the "take-away" messages afterward. In addition to the main body of the book, which focuses on selected individual social determinants of mental health, the volume includes an in-depth overview that summarizes the editors' and their colleagues' conceptualization, as well as a final chapter coauthored by Dr. David Satcher, 16th Surgeon General of the United States, that serves as a "Call to Action," offering specific actions that can be taken by both clinicians and policymakers to address the social determinants of mental health. The editors have succeeded in the difficult task of balancing the individual/clinical/patient perspective and the population/public health/community point of view, while underscoring the need for both groups to work in a unified way to address the inequities in twenty-first century America. The Social Determinants of Mental Health gives readers the tools to understand and act to improve mental health and reduce risk for mental illnesses for individuals and communities. Students preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) will also benefit from this book, as the MCAT in 2015 will test applicants' knowledge of social determinants of health. The social determinants of mental health are not distinct from the social determinants of physical health, although they deserve special emphasis given the prevalence and burden of poor mental health.
Download or read book Essays on the Psychological and Social Determinants of Economic Behavior written by Arno Apffelstaedt and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
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 Economics and Mental Health written by Thomas G. McGuire and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper is concerned with the economics of mental health. We argue that mental health economics is like health economics only more so: uncertainty and variation in treatments are greater; the assumption of patient self-interested behavior is more dubious; response to financial incentives such as insurance is exacerbated; the social consequences and external costs of illness are formidable. We elaborate on these statements and consider their implications throughout the chapter. Special characteristics' of mental illness and persons with mental illness are identified and related to observations on institutions paying for and providing mental health services. We show that adverse selection and moral hazard appear to hit mental health markets with special force. We discuss the emergence of new institutions within managed care that address long-standing problems in the sector. Finally, we trace the shifting role of government in this sector of the health economy
Download or read book Empirical Essays in Health Economics written by Van Hai Nguyen and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis comprises four essays on important public health issues. The first essay studies how social interactions can spread petty corruption in the health sector. Using a Vietnam dataset, I find that social interactions measured by advice on hospital choice increase the propensity of patients to give bribes to hospital staff as well as raises the bribe amount. There is also evidence on the information-transmitting role of social networks. The second essay evaluates long term health impacts of Agent Orange exposure in the VietnamWar on the Vietnamese population. I use a unique dataset that includes both self reported hypertension and objectively measured blood pressure. The results indicate that exposure to Agent Orange significantly increases the risk of having hypertension and reduce height, with the largest burden falling on the cohort born during the spraying period and on the most heavily sprayed areas. I also show that using self-reported hypertension data may lead to upward bias in the estimate of the effects of Agent Orange on hypertension. There is also evidence that exposure to Agent Orange and herbicides during the Vietnam War increases risk of cancer and mental illness. The third essay investigates a possible link between hypertension and happiness by examining possible impacts of neighborhood wealth on individuals' hypertension. Using both self-reported and objective hypertension data to proxy for happiness, I find that self-reported hypertension rate is much lower than objectively measured hypertension rate which lead to a large discrepancy between results obtained from self-reported and objective hypertension data. Moreover, I find that high neighborhood wealth raises hypertension risks for people aged 55-65 and not for younger or older age groups. The fourth essay provides a theoretical rationale for smoking bans by proposing a theoretical model of maximizing behaviour on the part of smokers. It also empirically evaluates effects of smoking bans imposed at home and in workplace. Both calibrated model simulations and empirical results suggest that, with the exception of heavy smokers, workplace bans have relatively minor impacts on smokers while restrictions on smoking in the home are found to be of an order of importance greater.
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 Social Epidemiology written by Lisa F. Berkman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-09 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows the important links between social conditions and health and begins to describe the processes through which these health inequalities may be generated. It reviews a range of methodologies that could be used by health researchers in this field and proposes innovative future research directions.
Download or read book U S Health in International Perspective written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
