Time Aggregation in Health Insurance Deductibles

By Long Hong and Corina Mommaerts

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Health insurance plans increasingly pay for expenses only beyond a large annual deductible. This paper explores the implications of deductibles that reset over shorter timespans. We develop a model of insurance demand between two actuarially equivalent de...

Saving Lives with Indexed Disaster Funds: Evidence from Mexico

By Alejandro del Valle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Developing economies are not disproportionately exposed to natural disasters, but they experience significantly more deaths. Exploiting a discontinuity in the eligibility rules for Mexico's indexed disaster fund (Fonden), I show that the accelerated recon...

How Economists Could Help Inform Economic and Budget Analysis Used by the US Congress

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Staff of the Congressional Budget Office

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The US Congress uses economic and budgetary projections, cost estimates for proposed legislation, and other analyses provided by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as part of its legislative process. CBO makes assessments based on an understanding of f...

Philanthropic Cause Prioritization

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Emily Oehlsen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Many foundations decide how much and where to give based on their founders' personal precommitments to specific issues, geographies, and/or institutions. If a grantmaking organization instead wanted to select problems based on a general measure of impac...

Maternal Mental Health Responses to COVID-19 Shocks and Uncertainty in Rural Pakistan

By Michelle Escobar Carias, Victoria Baranov, Joanna Maselko, Pietro Biroli, and Sonia Bhalotra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

In this paper, we investigate the association between a battery of mental health measures and experienced morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19, worry about disease risk, experienced economic shocks, and economic uncertainty about the future. We find th...

Depression, Poverty, and Economic Shocks: Evidence from India

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper examines the correlations between socioeconomic status, economic shocks, and depression, and how these vary by gender, in a sample of adults from India. Poverty and the exposure to negative shocks are both associated with depression. However, t...

The Economic Burden of Dementia in India

By Marco Angrisani, Maria Casanova, Jinkook Lee, and Erik Meijer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper provides the first estimate of the economic cost borne by Indian individuals living with dementia and their families based on nationally and state-wise representative data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI). We found that the ann...

Air Pollution and Mental Health: Evidence from China

By Shuai Chen, Paulina Oliva, and Peng Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We estimate the short-run effect of air pollution on mental illness. Using the China Family Panel Studies covering 12,615 urban residents during 2014–2015, we find a significantly positive effect of air pollution—instrumented by thermal inversions—o...

Early Home Visiting Delivery Model and Maternal and Child Mental Health at Primary School Age

By Gabriella Conti, Sören Kliem, and Malte Sandner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study the impacts of a prenatal and infancy home visiting program targeting disadvantaged families on mental health outcomes, assessed through diagnostic interviews. The program significantly reduced the prevalence of mental health conditions for both ...

Sleep Norms

By Osea Giuntella, Andrea Kiss, and Stephanie W. Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study documents sleep norms and studies the effect of norm information on anticipated behavioral change. Participants were shown either a small or large gap between others' ideal sleep duration (injunctive norm) and actual sleep patterns (descriptive...

Racial Wealth Inequality and Access to Care with High-Deductible Health Insurance

By Naomi Zewde

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper evaluates racial inequalities in health-care affordability between high-deductible and conventional insurance. Using the 2011–2017 National Health Interview Survey, the study finds that Blacks in high-deductible plans are not disproportionate...

The Impact of Family Tax Benefits on Children's Health and Educational Outcomes

By Michael Baker, Kourtney Koebel, and Mark Stabile

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We leverage recent income support reforms for families with children in Canada to investigate the impact of child benefits on child health and educational outcomes. Using administrative school data from British Columbia linked to parents' tax files, we fi...

Does Reducing Early School Tracking Affect Health Behaviors?

By Serena Canaan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This paper examines how delaying the age of school tracking affects long-term health behaviors and access to preventive care. I exploit a reform of the French middle school system, which delayed the placement of students into vocational and academic educa...

Spillovers and Training Effects on Mental Health Prescribing for Children

By Janet Currie, W. Bentley MacLeod, and Mengsong Ouyang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We use data on all prescriptions filled at US retail pharmacies from 2006 to 2018 to examine deviations from best practice in prescribing psychiatric medications to children. The results demonstrate the importance of spillovers from other doctors in the s...

Labor Market Outcomes and Reforms in China

[Symposium: China's Economy]

By Xin Meng

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2012

Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the k...

The Impacts of Physician Payments on Patient Access, Use, and Health

By Diane Alexander and Molly Schnell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We examine how supply-side health insurance generosity affects patient access, use, and health. Exploiting large, exogenous changes in Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians, we find that increasing payments for new patient office visits reduces repo...

Spillovers without Social Interactions in Urban Sanitation

By Joshua W. Deutschmann, Molly Lipscomb, Laura Schechter, and Jessica Zhu

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We run a randomized controlled trial coupled with lab-in-the-field social network experiments in urban Dakar. Decision spillovers and health externalities play a large role in determining uptake of sanitation technology, with decision spillovers being lar...

Health Care Centralization: The Health Impacts of Obstetric Unit Closures in the United States

By Stefanie Fischer, Heather Royer, and Corey White

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Over the last few decades, health care services in the United States have become more geographically centralized. We study how the loss of hospital-based obstetric units in over 400 counties affects maternal and infant health via a difference-in-differenc...

Geographic centralization of health care

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Do obstetric unit closures lead to worse health outcomes for mothers and newborns?

The Impact of Legal Abortion on Maternal Mortality

By Sherajum Monira Farin, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco, and Michael F. Pesko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

Legal abortion has recently been suggested as an essential health care service. In this study, we consider whether abortion legalization over 1969–1973 improved women's health as measured by maternal mortality. Our event study results indicate that lega...