Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Health Economics Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Edward Okeke

Growth and Development

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Health Economics

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 …

Go to article

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 …

Go to article

Can Institutional Deliveries Reduce Newborn Mortality? Evidence From Rwanda, Edward Okeke, A.V. Chari Dec 2013

Can Institutional Deliveries Reduce Newborn Mortality? Evidence From Rwanda, Edward Okeke, A.V. Chari

Edward Okeke

Current global health policies emphasize institutional deliveries as a pathway to achieving reductions in newborn mortality in developing countries. There is however remarkably little evidence regarding a causal relationship between institutional deliveries and newborn mortality. In this paper we take advantage of a shock to institutional deliveries provided by the randomized rollout of a government performance-based financing program in Rwanda, to provide the first estimates of this causal effect. We construct an instrumental variables estimator that combines interrupted time-series and difference-in-differences approaches. We do not find any statistically significant effect of an institutional birth on either 7- or 30-day mortality …

Go to article

Brain Drain: Do Economic Conditions “Push” Doctors Out Of Developing Countries?, Edward Okeke Nov 2013

Brain Drain: Do Economic Conditions “Push” Doctors Out Of Developing Countries?, Edward Okeke

Edward Okeke

Health worker migration is an issue of first order concern in global health policy circles and continues to be the subject of much policy debate. In this paper, we contribute to the discussion by studying the impact of economic conditions on the migration of physicians from developing countries. To our knowledge, this is one of the first papers to do so. A major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a new panel dataset on migration to the US and the UK from 31 sub-Saharan Africa countries. The data spans the period 1975-2004. Using this data, we estimate the …

Go to article

Do Higher Salaries Lower Physician Migration?, Edward Okeke Dec 2012

Do Higher Salaries Lower Physician Migration?, Edward Okeke

Edward Okeke

It is believed that low wages are an important reason why doctors and nurses in developing countries migrate, and this has led to a call for higher wages for health professionals in developing countries. In this paper, we provide some of the first estimates of the impact of raising health workers’ salaries on migration. Using aggregate panel data on the stock of foreign doctors in 16 OECD countries, we explore the effect of a wage increase programme in Ghana on physician migration. We find evidence that 6 years after the implementation of this programme, the foreign stock of Ghanaian doctors …

Go to article

What Is The Price Of Prevention? New Evidence From A Field Experiment., Edward Okeke, Akinfolarin Adepiti, Kayode Ajenifuja Dec 2012

What Is The Price Of Prevention? New Evidence From A Field Experiment., Edward Okeke, Akinfolarin Adepiti, Kayode Ajenifuja

Edward Okeke

How does increasing access to treatment affect the demand for preventive testing? In this paper we present results from a field experiment in Nigeria in which we offered cervical cancer screening to women at randomly chosen prices. To test our hypothesis, we also offered women a lottery where the payoff was a subsidy towards the cost of cervical cancer treatment (conditional upon a diagnosis of cervical cancer). We find that women randomly selected to receive the conditional cancer treatment subsidy were about 4 percentage points more likely to take up screening than those in the control group. We also show …

Go to article

Aids Treatment And Mental Health: Evidence From Uganda, Edward Okeke, Glenn Wagner Dec 2012

Aids Treatment And Mental Health: Evidence From Uganda, Edward Okeke, Glenn Wagner

Edward Okeke

Increased access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in developing countries over the last decade is believed to have contributed to reductions in HIV transmission and improvements in life expectancy. While numerous studies document the effects of ART on physical health and functioning, comparatively less attention has been paid to the effects of ART on mental health outcomes. In this paper we study the impact of ART on depression in a cohort of patients in Uganda entering HIV care. We find that twelve months after beginning ART, the prevalence of major and minor depression in the treatment group had fallen by approximately …

Go to article