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Selected Works

Selected Works

2016

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Health Economics

Effects Of The Affordable Care Act On Part-Time Employment: Early Evidence, Marcus Dillender, Carolyn Heinrich, Susan Houseman (Corresponding Author) Jun 2016

Effects Of The Affordable Care Act On Part-Time Employment: Early Evidence, Marcus Dillender, Carolyn Heinrich, Susan Houseman (Corresponding Author)

Susan N. Houseman

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires employers with at least 50 full-time-equivalent employees to offer “affordable” health insurance to employees working 30 or more hours per week. If employers do not comply with the mandate, they may face substantial financial penalties. Employers can potentially circumvent the mandate by reducing weekly hours below the 30-hour threshold or by using other nonstandard employment arrangements (direct-hire temporaries, agency temporaries, small contractors, and independent contractors). We examine the effects of the ACA on short-hours, part-time employment. Using monthly CPS data, we estimate that the ACA resulted in an increase in low-hours, involuntary part-time employment …

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Intermediate Input Sharing In The Hospital Service Industry, Jing Li Jan 2016

Intermediate Input Sharing In The Hospital Service Industry, Jing Li

Jing LI

This paper addresses two related questions that help to explain geographic variation in access to medical services. The first question examines the existence of agglomeration economies in the hospital service industry. The second considers whether the sharing of intermediate inputs contributes to spillovers from spatial concentration of hospital services. These questions are addressed by estimating a bivariate probit model that explicitly controls for potential correlations between whether a service is provided and how the service is provided. Three key findings are obtained. First, hospitals in more concentrated areas are more likely to outsource intermediate services to specialized intermediate service suppliers. …

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The Influence Of State Policy And Proximity To Medical Services On Health Outcomes, Jing Li Jan 2016

The Influence Of State Policy And Proximity To Medical Services On Health Outcomes, Jing Li

Jing LI

This paper examines two factors that help to explain geographic variation in health outcomes. The first factor concerns proximity to medical services. The second factor is state-specific health care policy that may impede access to nearby medical services. Four key findings are obtained. First, the effect of local doctors on reducing mortality rates of various diseases in a county attenuates with distance. Second, at approximately the same distance, in-state doctors contribute more to lowering mortality rates in the primary county than do out-of-state doctors. Third, the lesser impact of nearby out-of-state doctors is further reduced when the primary state adopts …

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Does Price Affect The Demand For Information About New Health Technologies? Evidence From A Field Experiment In Nigeria, Edward Okeke, A. V. Chari, Akinfolarin Adepiti Dec 2015

Does Price Affect The Demand For Information About New Health Technologies? Evidence From A Field Experiment In Nigeria, Edward Okeke, A. V. Chari, Akinfolarin Adepiti

Edward Okeke

We study how pricing subsidies influence the demand for information about a new preventative health technology. We conducted a field experiment in Nigeria where women were offered the opportunity to get screened for cervical cancer (at baseline 2/3 of women had no knowledge of cervical cancer screening). Field staff made house calls to give women information about the test, and also distributed vouchers that randomly varied the price of screening at the point of service. We study the demand for information in this context, and how it interacts with prices. We find an inverse U-shaped relationship between price and the …

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Does A Ban On Informal Health Providers Save Lives? Evidence From Malawi, Edward Okeke, Susan Godlonton Dec 2015

Does A Ban On Informal Health Providers Save Lives? Evidence From Malawi, Edward Okeke, Susan Godlonton

Edward Okeke

Informal health providers ranging from drug vendors to traditional healers account for a large fraction of health care provision in developing countries. They are, however, largely unlicensed and unregulated leading to concern that they provide ineffective and, in some cases, even harmful care. A new and controversial policy tool that has been proposed to alter household health seeking behavior is an outright ban on these informal providers. The theoretical effects of such a ban are ambiguous. In this paper, we study the effect of a ban on informal (traditional) birth attendants imposed by the Malawi government in 2007. To measure …

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Disentangling Moral Hazard And Adverse Selection In Private Health Insurance, David Powell, Dana Goldman Dec 2015

Disentangling Moral Hazard And Adverse Selection In Private Health Insurance, David Powell, Dana Goldman

David Powell

Moral hazard and adverse selection create inefficiencies in private health insurance markets and understanding the relative importance of each factor is critical for policy.   We use claims data from a large firm which changed health insurance plan options to isolate moral hazard from plan selection.  Using an instrumental variables quantile regression approach, we estimate the differential causal impact of each health insurance plan on the entire distribution of medical expenditures.  We account for systematic sample attrition during the sample period by conditioning on a nonseparable sample selection adjustment.   Our estimates imply that 54% of the additional medical spending …

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