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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

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Economics

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2013

Demand

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

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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