Health Economics Commons^™

Basic Human Health And Sustainable Community Development: A Case Study Of A Community In Monte Plata, Dominican Republic, Rachelle H. Arnoux

Capstone Collection

One of my objectives in conducting this research is to enhance my skills in data collection while simultaneously improving my writing skills. More substantively, I wanted to explore how access to healthcare in a developing country like the Dominican Republic can contribute to sustainable development. As good health is fundamental and vital for all human beings, it is important in the context of this study to understand how the healthcare system in a particular country gives the population access to quality healthcare. Referring myself specifically to the situation at Batey Relief Alliance (BRA) Dominicana medical center in the Dominican Republic …

Public Health Services & Systems Research And The Reforming U.S. Health System, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

This session reviews progress in the field of public health services & systems research (PHSSR), with a specific focus on findings that can inform the implementation and impact of health reform strategies on the U.S. public health system.

Can Community Water Projects Combat Child Diarrhea? Results From The Solomon Islands, Thomas G. Sackman

Master's Theses

There is a vast amount of existing literature that has empirically scrutinized whether or not community water projects have the ability to mitigate diarrheal disease. A strong and persistent belief thinks that community water projects do have the means, however, over the decades empirical work commonly finds this to simply not be true. This study expands the research question to the Solomon Islands. The research tests the hypothesis using a differences-in-differences identification strategy by utilizing the government’s staggered timing rollout of community water subprojects with whether or not a village received a community water subproject to test for a program …

Impact Of Typhoons On Children's Human Capital Investments In Filipino Households, Kate Zitelli

Master's Theses

Typhoons are a unique type of natural disaster affecting both developing and developed countries, causing both short and long-term destruction. Typhoons are random both in intensity and frequency, making them difficult to predict their strength and when they will strike. With global climate change, typhoons are expected to increase in both frequency and magnitude, making it important to understand their impacts. This study uses DHS data from the Philippines and a unique Filipino typhoon data set covering they years 1989-2008 to explore how typhoons affect household allocation of basic human capital investments, such as breastfeeding duration. Using OLS estimation and …

Producing Population Health: Collective Action Requires Infrastructure, Incentives & Evidence, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Population health improvement strategies are collective action problems that require targeted infrastructure, incentives, and information to succeed. Research on collective action problems and solutions in public health and other spheres of practice offer insight for the successful scale and spread of population health innovations.

Geographic Variation Of Health Care Spending On Heart Failure In Metropolitan Areas, Kevin Mcmillan

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The costs of healthcare have long been a concern in the United States. It is well known that these costs vary geographically, but attempts to explain this variation have been met with limited and varied success. This is partly attributable to the fact that data available have restricted analyses to assessing the issue to using Medicare cost per beneficiary. In June, 2013, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released new Medicare data that detailed the charges and payments made to hospitals throughout the United States in 2011. In this thesis, this new dataset was used to examine costs …

Health Reform Implementation: Update And Implications For Kentucky, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

This talk reviews the progress of health reform implementation in Kentucky with a focus on opportunities for aligning systems for medical care, public health, and social support delivery to improve population health.

Unifying Systems For Population Health: Infrastructure, Incentives & Evidence For Collective Action, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

This presentation, part of the SBM Presidential Symposium on Aligning Family, Clinical, and Community Systems, reviews the collective action problems that are commonly encountered in implementing multi-sector population health improvement strategies, and examines research on ways of using public health strategies and infrastructure to overcome these problems.

Historical Health Conditions In Major Us Cities: The Hue Data Set, Carlos Villareal, Brian Bettenhausen, Eric Hanss, Jonathan Hersh

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

The Historical Urban Ecological data set is a new resource detailing health and environmental conditions within seven major U.S. cities during the study period from 1830 to 1930. Researchers collected and digitized ward-level data from annual reports of municipal departments that detail the epidemiological, economic, and demographic conditions within each city. They then drafted new geographic information system data to link the tabular records to ward geographies. These data provide a new foundation to revisit questions surrounding the urban mortality transition and the growth of U.S. cities.

Can Human Capital Explain The Difference In Private Health Insurance Coverage Rates Between Natives And Immigrants?, Benjamin S. White

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper investigates how human capital variables, especially educational attainment and health disability, affect an immigrant’s probability to have private health insurance. Specifically, is there a convergence to natives’ coverage rates for immigrants as human capital is controlled for? Two probit regressions are used to answer this question, one to analyze the employer provided health insurance market and another to analyze privately purchased health insurance market. The principle finding is that human capital variables are important in determining access to private health insurance. However, a health insurance coverage differential does remain between immigrants and natives.

Creating Learning Systems: Lessons From Public Health Practice-Based Research Networks, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Practice-based research networks (PBRNs) provide powerful mechanisms for implementing research studies that evaluate the health and economic effects of delivery system innovations. This presentation reviews strategies, emerging findings, and lessons learned from PBRNs and related studies conducted in U.S. public health settings. We give special focus to studies that examine multi-organizational and cross-sectoral strategies for population health improvement.

Cost-Effectiveness Of Food And Cash Transfers To Patients Under Anti-Retroviral Treatment In Zambia, Chibamba Mwansakilwa, Gelson Tembo

Southern African Journal of Policy and Development

This study determines the relative cost-effectiveness of food and cash transfers when administered to Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) / Acquired Immune-Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) patients on Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) in Zambia. The results show that cash transfers are not only cheaper but also unambiguously more cost-effective with respect to nutrition and health outcomes such as body-mass index (BMI) and Cluster of Differentiation 4 (CD4) count. This seems to suggest that, whenever market conditions and institutional capacities (banks, personnel, etc.) permit, cash should be given a higher rating by governments and other programming stakeholders than physical food aid as an instrument for …

Long-Term Health Effects Of Malaria Exposure Around Birth: Evidence From Colonial Taiwan, Simon Chang, Belton Fleisher, Seonghoon Kim, Shi-Yung Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In the early 20th century, the Japanese colonial government initiated an island-wide malaria eradication campaign in Taiwan, resulting in not only a rapid decline in malaria across time but also elimination of disparity across regions. Exploiting variations in malaria deaths caused by the campaign, we estimate causal effects of malaria exposure around birth on the health of elderly born in the colonial period. To mitigate potential biases caused by measurement errors and omitted confounders, we employ climatic factors to instrument for malaria deaths. Our findings suggest that people who were exposed to a high malaria risk around birth tend to …

Strengthening The Science Of Public Health Delivery: Complexities In Implementation, Inference & Translation, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Delivery systems for public health programs and policies are diffuse and heterogeneous across the U.S., reflecting wide variation in the capacity to implement population-level health improvement strategies. This lecture examines strategies for evaluating the causes and consequences of variation in public health delivery across the U.S., with a focus on identifying pathways for improving the health and economic effects of policy and practice.

Are Online Pharmacy Prices Really Lower In Mexico?, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Adam G. Walke

Departmental Papers (E & F)

Empirical research on international pharmaceutical prices has uncovered numerous interesting commonalities and differences across international markets. This study examines price differences for brand name medicines sold over the Internet in the United States and Mexico. Web sites in both countries advertise their services in English and price their products in dollars. Sample data for 50 topselling medicines are from October 2011 for equal dosages on a per unit basis, exclusive of shipping fees, handling charges, and taxes. For a few medicines, the savings available to consumers who purchase them from companies in Mexico are very large. For most medicines in …

Mountain Monitor - 4th Quarter 2013, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

The quarter’s Mountain Monitor finds that the pace of economic recovery in the Mountain West region’s major metropolitan areas converged toward that of the rest of the nation in the last quarter of 2013.

While quarterly performance on the Monitor’s four indicators of economic recovery—employment, output, the unemployment rate, and house prices—varied considerably across the 10 major metro areas of the region, their combined performance broadly slowed to track with the rate of national economic recovery. The quarter’s average job growth remained unchanged in the region at 0.4 percent as the national economy caught up. The gap between the national …

The Influence Of State Policy And Proximity To Medical Services On Health Outcomes, Jing Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines two factors that help to explain geographic variation in health outcomes. The first factor concerns proximity to medical services. The second factor is state-specific health care policy that may impede access to nearby medical services. Four key findings are obtained. First, the effect of local doctors on reducing mortality rates of various diseases in a county attenuates with distance. Second, at approximately the same distance, in-state doctors contribute more to lowering mortality rates in the primary county than do out-of-state doctors. Third, the lesser impact of nearby out-of-state doctors is further reduced when the primary state adopts …

The Lasting Impact Of Parental Early Life Malnutrition On Their Offspring: Evidence From The China Great Leap Forward Famine, Seonghoon Kim, Quheng Deng, Belton M. Fleisher, Shi Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether the effects of parents’ in utero malnutrition extend to the second generation (their children). Specifically, we explore whether the second generation’s level of schooling is negatively impacted by their parents’ malnutrition in utero, using the China Famine as a natural experiment. We find that, the impact of mother’s in utero malnutrition due to the Famine reduced second generation male and female entrance into junior secondary school by about 5–7 percentage points. We measure famine severity with provincial excess death rates instrumented by measures of adverse climate conditions, which corrects for possible biases induced by measurement errors and …

Which Extramural Scientists Were Funded By Nih From Its Arra Funds?, Martin D. Sorin, Randall Hannum

Publications and Research

NIH distributed $10 billion of ARRA research funds among Principal Investigators (PIs) in 2009-2010. We studied how well the program achieved the goal of creating and retaining jobs. To analyze the distribution of ARRA funding among PIs, they were categorized in two ways: One was based on their history of research funding; the other on the type of funding, ARRA and non-ARRA, each received in 2009 and 2010. These classifications provide insights into who received ARRA funding and how many research PI jobs were created or retained. We found that the majority of ARRA award recipients already had grants and …

The Impact Of Fitness Technology On Health Outcomes, Megan C. Kelley

CMC Senior Theses

Using 2014 data compiled from a sample of Claremont McKenna undergraduate students, I examine the effect that fitness technology (i.e., mobile and wearable technology) has on users' health outcomes. Specifically, I find no effect of mobile or wearable use on self-reported health. However, I do find some evidence of mobile use on weight but not wearable. Applying a basic OLS regression analysis, I show that mobile users tend to be heavier than non-mobile users irrespective of gender. Furthermore, I find that contemporaneous health on prior mobile use show higher weight levels compared to non- mobile prior users. Such findings provide …