Swamped: Emergency department crowding and patient mortality
This study estimates the impact of emergency department crowding on patient mortality. Identification relies on the abrupt crowding shocks felt by “old” emergency departments at the time a new emergency department opens nearby. Using death records linked to hospital administrative records, I find that a 10 % alleviation of emergency department patient volume significantly lowers the average patient’s chance of mortality. Improvements appear to be realized both inside the hospital and after the patient has left. (Source: Journal of Health Economics)
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 29, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Wartime Health Shocks and the Postwar Socioeconomic Status and Mortality of Union Army Veterans and their Children
Publication date: Available online 28 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Dora L. Costa, Noelle Yetter, Heather DeSomerAbstractWe investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US Civil War (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger veterans who had been severely wounded in the war left the farm sector, becoming laborers. Consistent with human capital and job matching models, older severely wounded men were unlikely...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 29, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Sex, Marijuana and Baby Booms
Publication date: Available online 28 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Michele Baggio, Alberto Chong, David SimonAbstractWe study the behavioral changes caused by marijuana use on sexual activity, contraception, and birth counts by applying a differences-in-differences approach that exploits the variation in timing of the introduction of medical marijuana laws (MMLs) among states. We find that MMLs cause an increase in sexual activity, a reduction in contraceptive use conditional on having sex, and an increase in number of births. There is also suggestive evidence on temporary increases in the sta...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 29, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
The Effects of Medicare Advantage on Opioid Use
Publication date: Available online 26 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Laurence C. Baker, M. Kate Bundorf, Daniel P. KesslerAbstractDespite a vast literature on the determinants of prescription opioid use, the role of health insurance plans has received little attention. We study how the form of Medicare beneficiaries’ drug coverage affects the volume of opioids they consume. We find that enrollment in Medicare Advantage, which integrates drug coverage with other medical benefits, significantly reduces beneficiaries’ likelihood of filling an opioid prescription, as compared to enrollment in a ...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 27, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
The Role of Mexican Immigration to the United States in Improved Workplace Safety for Natives from 1980 to 2015
Publication date: Available online 26 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Marcus Dillender, Melissa McInerney (Source: Journal of Health Economics)
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 27, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
In-Kind Incentives and Health Worker Performance: Experimental Evidence from El Salvador
Publication date: Available online 26 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Pedro Bernal, Sebastian MartinezAbstractWe experimentally evaluated the effects of in-kind team incentives on health worker performance in El Salvador, with 38 out of 75 community health teams randomly assigned to performance incentives over a 12-month period. All teams received monitoring, performance feedback and recognition for their achievements allowing us to isolate the effect of the incentive. While both treatment and control groups exhibit improvements in performance measures over time, the in-kind incentives generated ...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 27, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
The Effect of Malpractice Law on Physician Supply: Evidence from Negligence-Standard Reforms
Publication date: Available online 24 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Michael D. Frakes, Matthew B. Frank, Seth A. SeaburyAbstractWe explore whether the composition of the physician workforce is impacted by the clinical standards imposed on physicians under medical liability rules. Specifically, we explore whether the proportion of non-surgeons practicing in a region decreases –and thus whether the proportion of surgeons increases—when liability standards are modified so as to expect that physicians practice more intensively. For these purposes, we draw on a quasi-experiment made possible by ...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 25, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Increased instruction time and stress-related health problems among school children
Publication date: Available online 23 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Jan Marcus, Simon Reif, Amelie Wuppermann, Amélie RoucheAbstractWhile several studies suggest that stress-related mental health problems among school children are related to specific elements of schooling, empirical evidence on this causal relationship is scarce. We examine a German schooling reform that increased weekly instruction time and study its effects on stress-related outpatient diagnoses from the universe of health claims data of the German Social Health Insurance. Exploiting the differential timing in the reform imp...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 24, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
The causal effect of education on chronic health conditions in the uk
Publication date: Available online 23 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Katharina Janke, David W. Johnston, Carol Propper, Michael A. ShieldsAbstractWe study the causal impact of education on chronic health conditions by exploitng two UK education policy reforms. The first reform raised the minimum school leaving age in 1972 and affected the lower end of the educational attainment distribution. The second reform is a combination of several policy changes that affected the broader educational attainment distribution in the early 1990s. Results are consistent across both reforms: an extra year of sch...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 24, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Ex ante inequality of opportunity in health, decomposition and distributional analysis of biomarkers
Publication date: Available online 23 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Apostolos Davillas, Andrew M JonesAbstractWe use a set of biomarkers to measure inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the risk of major chronic conditions in the UK. Applying a direct ex ante IOp approach, we find that inequalities in biomarkers attributed to circumstances account for a non-trivial part of the total variation. For example, observed circumstances account for 20% of the total inequalities in our composite measure of multi-system health risk, allostatic load. We propose an extension to the decomposition of ex ante IO...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 24, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Spillovers of Prosocial Motivation: Evidence from an Intervention Study on Blood Donors
Publication date: Available online 21 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Adrian Bruhin, Lorenz Goette, Simon Haenni, Lingqing JiangAbstractBlood donations are increasingly important for medical procedures, while meeting demand is challenging. This paper studies the role of spillovers arising from social interactions in the context of voluntary blood donations. We analyze a large-scale intervention among pairs of blood donors who live at the same street address. A quasi-random phone call provides the instrument for identifying the extent to which the propensity to donate spills over within these pair...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 21, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Neighborhood Networks and Program Participation
Publication date: Available online 19 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Daniel Grossman, Umair KhalilAbstractWe investigate whether social interactions among pregnant women can lead to increased Medicaid participation within this population. Using geographically fine vital statistics data, we exploit variation in Medicaid use among recently pregnant mothers, within small neighborhoods, to study the impact on participation among currently pregnant women. Women are more likely to use Medicaid benefits while pregnant including prenatal care, when previously pregnant women on their census block also re...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 20, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
Sources of regional variation in healthcare utilization in Germany
Publication date: Available online 13 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Martin Salm, Ansgar WübkerAbstractWe examine sources of regional variation in ambulatory care utilization in Germany. We exploit patient migration to examine which share of regional variation in ambulatory care utilization can be attributed to demand factors and to supply factors, respectively. Based on administrative claim-level data we find that regional variation can be overwhelmingly explained by patient characteristics. Our results contrast with previous results for other countries, and they suggest that institutional rul...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 14, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
The internet and children’s psychological wellbeing
Publication date: Available online 13 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Emily McDool, Philip Powell, Jennifer Roberts, Karl TaylorAbstractLate childhood and adolescence is a critical time for social and emotional development. Over the past two decades, this life stage has been hugely affected by the almost universal adoption of the internet as a source of information, communication, and entertainment. We use a large representative sample of over 6,300 children in England over the period 2012 to 2017, to estimate the effect of neighbourhood broadband speed, as a proxy for internet use, on a number o...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 14, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
The Impact of Cannabis Access Laws on Opioid Prescribing
Publication date: Available online 14 December 2019Source: Journal of Health EconomicsAuthor(s): Benjamin J. McMichael, R. Lawrence Van Horn, W. Kip ViscusiAbstractWhile recent research has shown that cannabis access laws can reduce the use of prescription opioids, the effect of these laws on opioid use is not well understood for all dimensions of use and for the general United States population. Analyzing a dataset of over 1.5 billion individual opioid prescriptions between 2011 and 2018, which were aggregated to the individual provider-year level, we find that recreational and medical cannabis access laws reduce the numb...
Source: Journal of Health Economics - December 14, 2019 Category: Health Management Source Type: research
