Health Economics Commons^™

The Effects Of Recent Minimum Wage Increases On Self-Reported Health In The United States, Liam Sigaud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A sharp income-health gradient exists in the United States. Lower levels of income are associated with higher rates of mortality, morbidity, and risky health behaviors, as well as decreased access to health care. Growing evidence of a causal link between income and health suggests that government income-support policies may be an effective strategy for improving health outcomes among poor Americans. One such policy – the minimum wage – has experienced a surge in popularity in recent years. In 2019, twenty-five states and the District of Columbia increased their minimum wage, up from only eight states in 2011. Yet the literature …

Children’S Health And Maternal Work Activities, Termeh Tavangar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I estimate the effect of poor child health on maternal labor force participation. Mothers of health-impaired children may decide not to work and stay at home to take care of their children. Alternatively, mothers may choose to enter the labor force to pay for these children’s additional resources. Which action dominates is the empirical question I answer in this paper. I control for the potential endogeneity of a child’s health status by using an instrumental variables approach. I find that if mothers have a child in poor health, the probability that the mother works is decreased by thirteen percentage points, …

Essays On Criminal Behaviour, Human Capital Formation, And Mental Health, Diego F. Salazar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis consists of three chapters that contribute to the study of some of the negative consequences of incarceration and their relation with the life-cycle choices of juvenile offenders.

Chapter 2 studies the causal relationship between incarceration and mental health problems. In this chapter, I use different matching estimators to identify the causal effects of incarceration over several dimensions of mental health using data from a survey of juvenile offenders, the Pathways to Desistance (PTD) survey. My findings show that being incarcerated for the first time, between 17 and 18 years old, increases depression by at least 0.18 standard deviations …

Essays On The Economics Of Health And Human Capital, Paloma Lopez De Mesa Moyano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores dynamics related to the formation of human capital. In the two chapters contained within, my work investigates how human capital is formed and maintained through either individual decisions or historic events. In particular, the first chapter analyzes the long-term health effects of a large-scale bombing campaign on the population of a developing country up to two generations after the event occurred; the second chapter analyzes how attending a public honors college in the U.S. affects the degree completion of students and their college quality choice. In these two different contexts, I approach the common topic of human …

Essays On Human Capital Complementarities, Hiroaki Mori

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The thesis consists of three chapters that study the interplay between skills and health in shaping labour market outcomes. I focus on two distinct but related issues: i) the wage losses among older workers due to work-limiting health conditions, and ii) the long lasting effects of childhood health conditions on human capital formation. Chapter two studies how health conditions among older workers affect their wages depending on the characteristics of their occupations. The U.S. Social Security Act defines disability as the inability due to health conditions to perform physically or mentally demanding tasks. To examine the potentially task-specific nature of …

The Effects Of Trade Competition On Health, And Determinants Of Workplace Behavior, Thomas Clayton Mcmanus

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation consists of three essays related to workplace behavior. In the first paper, we design a controlled laboratory experiment to study image motives in a setting where decisions signal intelligence. The experiment results show that in some settings social scrutiny can discourage individuals from making choices that signal their intelligence, despite evidence that the signal was privately valuable. In the second paper, we study the effect of Chinese import competition on occupational safety and health at US manufacturers. We find that a change in US trade policy and Chinese import shocks significantly increases worker injury and illness rates in …

Industry Career Guide: Health And Wellness, Paulynne Castillo, Madel Balane

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

The Health and Wellness Services industry belongs to the services sector. The National Statistical Coordination Board (2007) defines it as institutions that cater to the “activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for health and wellness purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited”. Establishments belonging to the industry, therefore, are in engaged in: 1) hospital care and treatment – refer to services offered by public and private hospitals, sanitaria and other similar services; 2) specialty clinics – pertain to …

Medical Care Spending And Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From Workers' Compensation Reforms, David Powell, Seth Seabury

David Powell

This paper studies the effectiveness of medical care spending on improving labor outcomes. Injuries sustained at work represent large income and welfare losses to households and there is a significant policy interest in reducing these burdens. Workers' compensation program is a large government program which provides monetary and medical benefits to injured workers. Despite the potential importance of medical care in improving the health and labor productivity of injured workers, little research has addressed the relationship between medical care provided through workers' compensation and post-injury labor outcomes. This paper exploits the 2003-2004 California workers' compensation reforms which reduced medical care …

A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health, Titus Galama

Titus Galama

Detailed understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the substantial socioeconomic disparities in health is necessary to design policies effective in reducing those disparities. This requires a unifying theory of socioeconomic status and health, which is currently absent. This thesis in economics aims to develop, in several steps, a theoretical framework of disparities in health by socioeconomic status over the life cycle, using economic principles and founded in health capital theory. The first part of this thesis addresses several serious technical issues with life-cycle models of health, medical care, and socioeconomic status. The second part presents the theoretical framework.

Grossman's Health Threshold And Retirement, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn, Raquel Fonseca, Pierre-Carl Michaud

Titus Galama

We formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. We explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which allow us to derive analytic solutions for the time paths of consumption, health, health investment, savings and retirement. We argue that the Grossman literature has been unnecessarily restrictive in assuming that health is always at Grossman’s “optimal” health level. Exploring the properties of corner solutions we find that advances in population health (health capital) can explain the paradox that …