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Edward Okeke

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Full-Text Articles in Health Economics

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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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 …

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The Price Sensitivity Of Medicare Beneficiaries: A Regression Discontinuity Approach., Thomas Buchmueller, Kyle Grazier, Richard Hirth, Edward Okeke Dec 2012

The Price Sensitivity Of Medicare Beneficiaries: A Regression Discontinuity Approach., Thomas Buchmueller, Kyle Grazier, Richard Hirth, Edward Okeke

Edward Okeke

We use 4 years of data from the retiree health benefits program of the University of Michigan to estimate the effect of price on the health plan choices of Medicare beneficiaries. During the period of our analysis, changes in the University's premium contribution rules led to substantial price changes. A key feature of this ‘natural experiment’ is that individuals who had retired before a certain date were exempted from having to pay any premium contributions. This ‘grandfathering’ creates quasi-experimental variation that is ideal for estimating the effect of price. Using regression discontinuity methods, we compare the plan choices of individuals …

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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 …

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