Download Free Three Essays In Applied Health Economics Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Three Essays In Applied Health Economics and write the review.

The Handbook of Health Economics provide an up-to-date survey of the burgeoning literature in health economics. As a relatively recent subdiscipline of economics, health economics has been remarkably successful. It has made or stimulated numerous contributions to various areas of the main discipline: the theory of human capital; the economics of insurance; principal-agent theory; asymmetric information; econometrics; the theory of incomplete markets; and the foundations of welfare economics, among others. Perhaps it has had an even greater effect outside the field of economics, introducing terms such as opportunity cost, elasticity, the margin, and the production function into medical parlance. Indeed, health economists are likely to be as heavily cited in the clinical as in the economics literature. Partly because of the large share of public resources that health care commands in almost every developed country, health policy is often a contentious and visible issue; elections have sometimes turned on issues of health policy. Showing the versatility of economic theory, health economics and health economists have usually been part of policy debates, despite the vast differences in medical care institutions across countries. The publication of the first Handbook of Health Economics marks another step in the evolution of health economics.
Discusses oil imports, medical welfare, health insurance, urban economic development, job discrimination, environmental preservation, interindustry flow analysis, social responsibility, and economic efficiency.
This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.
This collection of Michael Grossman’s most important papers adds essential background and depth to his work on economic determinants of public health. Each of the book’s four sections includes an introduction that contextualizes the issues and addresses the larger stakes of his work. An afterword discusses the significance of Grossman’s approach for subsequent research on health economics, as well as the work others have done to advance and extend his innovative perspective. Determinants of Health explains how the economic choices people make influence health and health behaviors. It begins with a section on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical results of Grossman’s groundbreaking health economics model, first introduced in the 1970s, followed by essays on the relationship between health and schooling; determinants of infant health, with a special emphasis on public policies and programs; and the economics of unhealthy behaviors. Grossman treats health as a form of human capital. He shows that public policies and programs that determine the price and availability of key inputs have critical effects on outcomes ranging from birth weight and infant mortality to cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and obesity. Grossman’s approach has led to a major stream of literature in the field, sparking contributions by the world’s leading health economists, including Joseph Newhouse, Jonathan Gruber, Amy Finkelstein, Michael Greenstone, and David Cutler. His clarity on the role that economics play in people’s good and bad health choices is immensely valuable to the debate over how we legislate and spend on health.
Covering all the main problems that arise in a typical cost-benefit exercise, this second edition reflects the most recent research in the area. It considers the main theoretical issues, the problem of ascribing a monetary value to things and includes six separate case studies.