The Legacy of Colonial Medicine in Central Africa

By Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero

American Economic Review, April 2021

Between 1921 and 1956, French colonial governments organized medical campaigns to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. Villagers were forcibly examined and injected with medications with severe, sometimes fatal, side effects. We digitized 30 years of arch...

The long shadow of colonial medicine

[Research Highlight]

April 02, 2021

To what extent did French health campaigns from 70 years ago feed modern day mistrust in Central Africa?

European Conference on the Diffusion of Genomic Medicine: Health Economics & Policy

[News]

April 20, 2021

The conference will be held online from May 26-28, 2021.

Fair Utilitarianism

By Marc Fleurbaey and Stéphane Zuber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

Utilitarianism plays a central role in economics, but there is a gap between theory, where utilitarianism is dominant, and applications, where monetary criteria are often used. For applications, a key difficulty is to define how utilities should be measur...

The Role of Behavioral Frictions in Health Insurance Marketplace Enrollment and Risk: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Richard Domurat, Isaac Menashe, and Wesley Yin

American Economic Review, May 2021

We experimentally varied information mailed to 87,000 households in California's health insurance marketplace to study the role of frictions in insurance take-up. Reminders about the enrollment deadline raised enrollment by 1.3 pp (16 percent) in this t...

Does the Individual Mandate Affect Insurance Coverage? Evidence from Tax Returns

By Ithai Z. Lurie, Daniel W. Sacks, and Bradley Heim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2021

We estimate the effect of the ACA's individual mandate on insurance coverage using regression discontinuity and regression kink designs with tax return data. We have four key results. First, the actual penalty paid per uninsured month is less than half th...

An Ounce of Prevention

[Symposium: Preventive Medicine]

By Joseph P. Newhouse

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather, preventive measures can be thought of as insu...

Indoor Air Quality, Information, and Socioeconomic Status: Evidence from Delhi

By Michael Greenstone, Kenneth Lee, and Harshil Sahai

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, there is relatively little information on indoor air pollution and how it varies by socioeconomic status (SES). Using indoor air quality monitors (IAQMs), we find that winter levels of household air pollu...

Disparities in Health Care and Medical Evaluations by Gender: A Review of Evidence and Mechanisms

By Marika Cabral and Marcus Dillender

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Male and female patients often receive different medical evaluations and treatment even when they have the same symptoms, and relative to men, women are less likely to receive benefits within social insurance programs that rely on medical evaluations. Thi...

Field Specializations among Beginning Economists: Are There Gender Differences?

By Eva Sierminska and Ronald L. Oaxaca

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the process underlying field specialization among beginning economists. Our multivariate logit framework accommodates single- and dual-field specializations with correlated choices. Including field-specific relative salaries and expected probab...

"Placebo Tests" for the Impacts of Air Pollution on Health: The Challenge of Limited Health Care Infrastructure

By Bruna Guidetti, Paula Pereda, and Edson Severnini

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

"Placebo tests" are normally used to support evidence of pollution impacts on health outcomes. In this study, we argue that one should be cautious to proceed with falsification tests. We examine how a large metropolitan area in Brazil copes with increased...

The Health Impacts of Coal-Fired Power Plants in India and the Co-benefits of Greenhouse Gas Reductions

By Maureen Cropper, Ryna Cui, Sarath Guttikunda, Nate Hultman, Puja Jawahar, Yongjoon Park, Xinlu Yao, and Xiaopeng Song

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Under the Paris Agreement, India has pledged that 40 percent of its electricity generating capacity will come from non-fossil-fuel sources by the year 2030; however, this pledge does not limit total coal-fired generating capacity. As of 2019, planned incr...

Local Industrial Policy and Sectoral Hubs

By Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Felipe Schwartzman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the desirability of industrial policies that generate sectoral hubs using a quantitative spatial model with cognitive nonroutine and other occupations. The productivity of each occupation in an industry depends on sector-specific production exter...

On the Inequity of Predicting A While Hoping for B

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Algorithms trained to predict mismeasured proxy variables can reproduce and scale up racial bias. This mechanism of algorithmic bias is distinct from others in the literature and harder to detect. We show this using examples from health care, but the forc...

Product Proliferation under Rational Inattention: Application to Health Insurance

By Zach Y. Brown and Jihye Jeon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In markets with complicated products such as insurance, why do firms offer many products even when consumers appear to receive little benefit? We show that when consumers face information acquisition costs, firms may have an incentive to introduce many un...

Can Automatic Retention Improve Health Insurance Market Outcomes?

By Adrianna McIntyre, Mark Shepard, and Myles Wagner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

There is growing interest in market design using default rules and other "choice architecture" principles to steer consumers toward desirable outcomes. Using data from Massachusetts's health insurance exchange, we study an "automatic retention" policy int...

Public Economics and Inequality: Uncovering Our Social Nature

By Emmanuel Saez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper argues that the social nature of humans, absent from the standard economic model, is crucial for understanding our large modern social states and why concerns about inequality are so pervasive. A social solution arises when a situation is resol...

Preparing for a Pandemic: Accelerating Vaccine Availability

By Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Eric Budish, Juan Camilo Castillo, Rachel Glennerster, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Kremer, Jean Lee, Canice Prendergast, Christopher M. Snyder, Alex Tabarrok, Brandon Joel Tan, and Witold Więcek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Vaccinating the world's population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procur...

Hurricane Maria and La Crisis Boricua on Health-Care Supply in Puerto Rico

By Jose M. Fernandez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Many medical professionals left Puerto Rico due to the financial crisis. Puerto Rico passed Act 14 in April 2017 to mitigate the exodus of physicians, reducing the flat tax on medical services to 4 percent. The same year, Puerto Rico was devastated by a C...

Boosting health coverage with better information

[Page]

Why do ACA insurance exchanges have such low take-up rates?