Health Economics Commons^™

Increasing Health Tourism Spending In The United States, Jorge Ridderstaat, Dipendra Singh

Rosen Research Review

An increasing number of people are taking advantage of health tourism to access medical services abroad. For the U.S. to be competitive in the lucrative health tourism environment, it is essential to target the right markets. Until now the information available to do this has been limited. This knowledge gap is being addressed by Dr. Jorge Ridderstaat and Dr. Dipendra Singh from Rosen College of Hospitality Management and colleagues. These researchers have developed a microeconomic elasticity approach that offers an understanding of the effects of individual tourism markets on the total health tourism spending in the U.S.

The Effect Of Good Samaritan Laws (Gsl) On Opioid Overdose Mortality, Tarun Ramesh

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper investigates the effects of Good Samaritan Laws on opioid overdose mortality rates in the United States. Evaluating policy interventions in response to upticks in opioid mortality is crucial to enact federal legislation that protects communities. However, concerns about moral hazard implications could have profound impacts on current efforts to combat the epidemic. This paper will look at various policies proposed and evaluate the effects of such policies on overall mortality rates, elucidating the moral hazard effects of Good Samaritan Laws.

Treatments For Cancer Given Orally: Patients' Perceptions Of Distress Due To Financial Toxicity, Ellen Carr

Dissertations

Purpose/Aims: For adult participants who have received or are receiving treatment for hematologic and solid tumor malignancies given orally, this study describes the relationship between participants’ experience of financial toxicity (FT), the participants’ perception of distress associated with FT, and participants’ self-identified adherence to prescribed treatments in the context of FT.

Background: FT has emerged as an additional source of distress for cancer patients. The costs of treatments given orally can be prohibitively expensive for patients. Therefore, these patients may experience considerable distress and may not adhere to treatments as prescribed.

Method: Descriptive cross-sectional correlational design study of a sample …

The Limitations Of The Euro: A Case Study Of The Covid-19 Pandemic In Italy, Madeleine Johnsson

Theses - Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy

The COVID-19 pandemic in Italy is the latest event following the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis and the 2015 European migrant crisis to expose the limitations of the euro. While the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over in Italy, the Italian economy faces a new dilemma. Italy finds itself in a potential deadlock as other countries outside and inside the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) are able to mitigate the impact of the pandemic through greater fiscal relief measures. Therefore, the fate of Italy’s economic woes lies in the hands of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Economic …

Mapping Socioeconomic Indicators By Race And County In Arkansas, Mervin Jebaraj, David Sorto

Urban League of the State of Arkansas

The Urban League of the State of Arkansas seeks to lead efforts in advancing and obtaining equal opportunities for all citizens with a particular focus in the areas of health, education, jobs, and housing. In keeping with this mission, the Urban League of Arkansas partnered with the Center for Business and Economic Research in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas to produce a report that provides data to identify key areas of need in the African American and Latinx communities in Arkansas and develop programs and policies to address them.

In this report, the …

Poverty In The United States: An Analysis Of Its Measurement And The Long-Term Social And Economic Costs, Abby Magnus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the role of poverty in the United States and how it has impacted social and economic systems. It explores how U.S. poverty measurements developed in the 1960s may not be accurately measuring poverty now, and the ways in which these measures could be improved upon. This work also reviews literature on health and educational inequities stemming from socioeconomic class, and the role these play in long-term economic mobility. Finally, it analyzes how larger social institutions like mass incarceration and capitalism have developed around poverty, and the role they play in maintaining its prevalence today. This thesis finds …

The Effect Of Health Insurance On Crime: Evidence From The Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion, Qiwei He, Scott Barkowski

Publications

Little evidence exists on the effect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on criminal behavior, a gap in the literature that this paper seeks to address. Using a simple model, we argue we should anticipate a decrease in time devoted to criminal activities in response to the expansion, because the availability of the ACA Medicaid coverage raises the opportunity cost of crime. This prediction is particularly relevant for the ACA expansion because it primarily affects childless adults, a population likely to contain individuals who engage in criminal behavior. We validate this forecast empirically using a difference‐in‐differences framework, estimating the expansion's …

Understanding Pharmaceutical Pricing In The United States, Ashley Howe

Economics Honors Papers

The issue of high drug prices in the United States is something that could go on forever due to the industry’s profit maximizing design. Given the current time with the COVID-19 pandemic, many changes will be made to what Americans have considered a “normal lifestyle” for the past century. This will involve policy changes across many industries to keep Americans safe throughout the duration of this disease, and through any other virus to come. Hopefully, significant changes will be made in the pharmaceutical industry. This industry is unlike any other industry in the world, as all major players: hospitals, insurance …

Evidence-Based Approach To Drug Crisis, Jiebing Wen

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

I am devoted to health policy research, especially tackling the opioid crisis, and evaluating marijuana laws and newly emerging issues associated with legal recreational drugs. Opioid overdose in the United States continues to jeopardize public health. Meanwhile, the majority of states have legalized medical marijuana and one third of them further liberalized recreational marijuana. Marijuana liberalization, although originally independent of the growing opioid crisis, may be a harm reduction approach to the crisis because marijuana may be a substitute for opioids in pain management at a relatively lower risk. However, marijuana liberalization may also lead to marijuana-related harms, such as …

The Effects Of E-Cigarette Taxes On E-Cigarette Prices And Tobacco Product Sales: Evidence From Retail Panel Data, Chad Cotti, Charles J. Courtemanche, Joanna Catherine Maclean, Erik Nesson, Michael F. Pesko, Nathan Tefft

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

We explore the effect of e-cigarette taxes enacted through 2017 in eight states and two large counties on e-cigarette prices, e-cigarette sales, and sales of other tobacco products. We use the Nielsen Retail Scanner data for the years 2011 to 2017, comprising approximately 35,000 retailers nationally. We calculate a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index of 0.251 for retail-based purchases of e-cigarettes, indicating high market concentration. We estimate a tax-to-price pass-through of 1.55 (p < 0.01) and an e-cigarette own-price elasticity of -2.6 (p < 0.01) for the average e-cigarette tax. We also estimate a positive cross-price elasticity of demand for e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes of roughly 1.1 for the average tax, suggesting that e-cigarettes and traditional cigarettes are economic substitutes. Our results suggest that higher e-cigarette taxes would increase e-cigarette prices and reduce e-cigarette sales, with an unintended effect of increasing traditional cigarette sales. We simulate that for every one standard e-cigarette pod (a device that contains liquid nicotine in e-cigarettes) of 0.7 ml no longer purchased as a result of an e-cigarette tax, the same tax increases traditional cigarettes purchased by 6.2 extra packs.

Examining The Effects Of Public Policies And Addiction On Purchase Of Tobacco Products With Causal Inference And Machine Learning Methods, Xueting Deng

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

My three essays explore the effects of tobacco policies and addiction on the consumption of e-cigarettes and other tobacco products. Recently, jurisdictions imposed taxes and other regulations on e-cigarettes, with the hope to raise tax revenues and address health concerns regarding e-cigarette use, especially youth addiction. My first essay in Chapter 1 focuses on the effects of e-cigarette taxes on sales of e-cigarettes. It compares the two types of tax policies on sales of e-cigarettes, cigarettes, and smoking-cessation products. This comparison provides information for lawmakers on decisions of taxes regarding the perspectives of revenue generation and tobacco control. Second, after …

A Comparative Analysis Of The Price Of Insulin In Canada And The United States, Kimia Z. Badakhshan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

There's frequent discourse regarding the rising cost of insulin in the US. Insulin is a drug that over 7 million people rely on for survival, and it has tripled in cost over the last decade. The pricing regulation of the drug is dependent on multiple stakeholders, including wholesalers, pharmacy benefit managers, and manufacturing companies. Due to the lack of governmental intervention in the process of pharmaceutical cost regulation in the US, data on the price negotiations and the rebate system between these entities is unavailable in public records, making it difficult to determine a primary cause as the root of …

The Analytics Of Vulnerable Populations In Brazil, Fernanda M. Araujo Maciel

2020

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs became a popular measure to alleviate poverty in Latin American countries. The Brazilian CCT program, called Bolsa Família, is the largest social welfare program in the country, covering a quarter of all Brazilian households. The objective of the program is to reduce poverty and malnutrition, while providing low-income families access to public services, such as health, education, and social assistance. Since the program is based on conditions of maintaining health and schooling for children, my dissertation comprises two studies that examine the impact of Bolsa Família on educational outcomes and unhealthy behaviors of its participants. …

Three Essays On Trade, Environment, And Health, Sookti Chaudhary

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

My dissertation consists of three essays on trade, environment and health. The first essay empirically evaluates domestic facilities' environmental response to Chinese import competition in the United States (US) manufacturing sector from 2000 to 2010. Using facility-level data on chemical emissions and employing an instrumental variables approach, the paper finds that industry/regional exposure to increased import competition had very little impact on the environmental decisions of domestic facilities.

The second essay empirically explores a possible link between the environmental justice efforts during the Obama administration and the change in environmental inequity by examining the change in US facilities' underlying environmental …

Hiit-Ing The Books: University Student Time Allocation And Exercise, Teigan Nicole Avery

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

A growing body of economic literature examines irrational human behavior in a variety of contexts, including exercise habits (Duckworth and Milkman 2019). Based on this research, small interventions known as nudges have been introduced, sometimes significantly altering how individuals behave. This study focuses on a specific population’s behavior to nudge: university student’s exercise habits. Despite the benefits of physical exercise, such as a 40-50% reduction in all-cause mortality, only half of the students surveyed by this study met CDC suggested exercise requirement of 5 hours per week—5% responded that they do not exercise at all (Morris et al. 1953). This …

Structural Discrimination In Covid-19 Workplace Protections, Ruqaiijah Yearby, Seema Mohapatra

All Faculty Scholarship

Workers, who are being asked to risk their health by working outside their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, need adequate hazard compensation, safe workplace conditions, and personal protective equipment (PPE). Sadly, this is not happening for many essential workers, such as those working in home health care and in the meat processing industry. These workers are not only being unnecessarily exposed to the virus, but they are also not receiving paid sick leave, unemployment benefits, and affordable health care and childcare. The lack of these protections is due to structural discrimination and has disproportionately disadvantaged women of color and low-wage …

Observing The Effects Of Antimalarial Drug Availability On Women’S Work Absenteeism, Rei Imada

CMC Senior Theses

This study aims to provide insight on how availability of antimalarial drugs can help alleviate the economic burden of malaria. Much of the existing literature that looks into the effects of antimalarial drug availability focuses on the associated health benefits, but fails to draw a link to the economic benefits that may also be incurred. Using data from the 2015-2016 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey and Malaria Indicator Survey, this study performs a series of multiple regressions to observe how increased availability of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), a front-line antimalarial drug in most African countries, affects likelihood of work absenteeism …

Moral Hazards And Negative Externalities Of Lifesaving Programs: How Naloxone Access Laws And Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Affect Hiv Transmission, Jeremy Horn

CMC Senior Theses

This paper looks at naloxone access laws and prescription drug monitering programs and see how these programs affect HIV transmission and drug overdose deaths. Using an OLS regression I find that NAL reduces HIV and increases overdose deaths. I also find reducing the number of drug prescriptions increase HIV and overdose deaths because users switch to intravenous methods.

Three Essays On Health Economics And Policy Evaluation, Shishir Shakya

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation consists of three essays on the U.S. Health care policy. Each paragraph below refers to the three abstracts for the three chapters in this dissertation, respectively. I provide quantitative evidence on how much Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) affects the retail opioid prescribing behaviors. Using the American Community Survey (ACS), I retrieve county-level high dimensional panel data set from 2010 to 2017. I employ three separate identification strategies: difference-in-difference, double selection post-LASSO, and spatial difference-in-difference. I compare how the retail opioid prescribing behaviors of counties, that are mandatory for prescribers to check the PDMP before prescribing controlled substances …

A Contemporary Tale Of Two Countries - State Of Children In India And Pakistan, Arijit Ray

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Some common economic problems of the Indian subcontinent are its low per-capita income, major dependence on agriculture, heavy population pressure, chronic unemployment, slow capital formation, limited opportunity for human capital development, rising pollution, and heavy inequality in the wealth distribution. Each of these problems affects its children in its unique way, both directly and indirectly. However, some problems are human-made which directly affect its own existence. I focus on two countries in the Indian subcontinent: India and Pakistan, where such problems exist. In both societies, female children are valued less than male children, a common theme across many other countries …