Early-Life Health and Adult Circumstance in Developing Countries

Early-Life Health and Adult Circumstance in Developing Countries

Janet Currie, Tom Vogl

NBER Working Paper No. 18371
Issued in September 2012
NBER Program(s):   AG   CH   HC   HE   LS

A growing literature documents the links between long-term outcomes and health in the fetal period, infancy, and early childhood. Much of this literature focuses on rich countries, but researchers are increasingly taking advantage of new sources of data and identification to study the long reach of childhood health in developing countries. Health in early life may be a more significant determinant of adult outcomes in these countries because health insults are more frequent, the capacity to remediate is more limited, and multiple shocks may interact. However, the underlying relationships may also be more difficult to measure, given significant mortality selection. We survey recent evidence on the adult correlates of early-life health and the long-term effects of shocks due to disease, famine, malnutrition, pollution, and war.

http://www.princeton.edu/~tvogl/currie_vogl_AR.pdf

New NBER Working Papers on Homocide Laws

Using Audit Studies to Test for Physician Induced Demand: The Case of Antibiotic Abuse in China
Janet Currie, Wanchuan Lin, Juanjuan Meng

NBER Working Paper No. 18153
Issued in June 2012
NBER Program(s):   HC   HE

The overuse of medical services including antibiotics is often blamed on Physician Induced Demand. But since this theory is about physician motivations, it is difficult to test. We conduct an audit study in which physician financial incentives, beliefs about what patients want, and desires to reciprocate for a small gift are systematically varied. We find that all of these treatments reduce antibiotics prescriptions, suggesting that antibiotics abuse in China is not driven by patients actively demanding antibiotics, by physicians believing that patients want antibiotics, or by physicians believing that antibiotics are in the best interests of their patients, but is largely driven by financial incentives. Our results also show that physician behavior can be significantly influenced by the receipt of a token gift, such as a pen.

Ungated Version

Stand Your Ground Laws and Homicides
Chandler B. McClellan, Erdal Tekin

NBER Working Paper No. 18187
Issued in June 2012
NBER Program(s):   HE   LE

Since 2005, eighteen states have passed legislation that has extended the right to self-defense, with no duty to retreat, to places a person has a legal right to be, and several other states are debating to introduce similar legislation. The controversies surrounding these laws have captured the nation’s attention recently. Despite significant implications that they may have on public safety, there has been little empirical investigation of the impact of these laws on crime and victimization. In this paper, we examine how Stand Your Ground laws that extend the right to self-defense to areas outside the home affect homicides using monthly data from the U.S. Vital Statistics. We identify the impact of these laws by exploiting the variation in the effective date of these laws across states. Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males. According to our estimates, between 4.39 and 7.44 additional white males are killed each month as a result of these laws. We find no evidence to suggest that these laws increase homicides among blacks. Our results are robust to a number of specifications and unlikely to be driven entirely by the killings of assailants. Taken together, our findings raise serious doubts against the argument that Stand Your Ground laws make America safer.

The Effects of Health Care Reform

Does Universal Coverage Improve Health? The Massachusetts Experience
Charles J. Courtemanche and Daniela Zapata

NBER Working Paper No. 17893
March 2012

JEL No. I12,I13,I18

ABSTRACT

In 2006, Massachusetts passed health care reform legislation designed to achieve nearly universal coverage through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, and subsidies that later served as the model for national health care reform. Using individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, we provide evidence that health care reform in Massachusetts led to better overall self-assessed health. An assortment of robustness checks and placebo tests support a causal interpretation of the results. We also document improvements in several determinants of overall health, including physical health, mental health, functional limitations, joint disorders, body mass index, and moderate physical activity. The health effects were strongest among women, minorities, near-elderly adults, and those with incomes low enough to qualify for the law’s subsidies. Finally, we use the reform to instrument for health insurance and estimate a sizeable impact of coverage on health. The effects on coverage were strongest for men, non-black minorities, young adults, and those who qualified for the subsidies, while the effects of coverage were strongest for women, blacks, the near-elderly, and middle-to-upper income individuals.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w17893.pdf

New NBER Working Paper: Getting up to Speed on the Financial Crisis: A One-Weekend-Reader's Guide

Getting up to Speed on the Financial Crisis: A One-Weekend-Reader's Guide

Gary B. Gorton and Andrew Metrick

NBER Working Paper No. 17778

January 2012

ABSTRACT

All economists should be conversant with “what happened?” during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We select and summarize 16 documents, including academic papers and reports from regulatory and international agencies. This reading list covers the key facts and mechanisms in the build-up of risk, the panics in short-term-debt markets, the policy reactions, and the real effects of the financial crisis.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w17778.pdf

Meltzer and Chung - Emergence of Hospitalists

One of the main papers spoken about today during Professor Meltzer's talk is available below from the NBER series.

Coordination, Switching Costs and the Division of Labor in General Medicine: An Economic Explanation for the Emergence of Hospitalists in the United States

David O. Meltzer, Jeanette W. Chung NBER Working Paper No. 16040 Issued in May 2010 NBER Program(s):   HC   General medical care in the United States has historically been provided by physicians who care for their patients in both ambulatory and hospital settings. Care is now increasingly divided between physicians specializing in hospital care (hospitalists) and ambulatory-based care primary care physicians. We develop and find strong empirical support for a theoretical model of the division of labor in general medicine that views the use of hospitalists as balancing the costs of coordinating care across physicians in the hospitalist model against physicians’ costs switching between ambulatory and hospital settings in the traditional model. Our findings suggest opportunities to improve care.

NBER - Sadness, Suicidality and Grades

Sadness, Suicidality and Grade

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Jeffrey S. DeSimone NBER Working Paper No. 16239 July 2010 This study examines the past year relationship between GPA and experiencing a combination of two primary depression symptoms, feeling sad and losing interest in usual activities for at least two consecutive weeks, among high school students during 2001–2009. The GPA loss associated with sadness, as defined above, falls from slightly less than a plus/minus mark to around 0.1 point when commonly co-occurring behaviors are held constant. Nonetheless, this effect is significantly larger than those of having considered or planned suicide and equivalent to having attempted suicide, which seemingly signify more severe depression. Moreover, sadness lowers the probability of earning A grades, and raises that of receiving grades of C or below, by over 15%. Coefficient sizes are similar when comparison groups are restricted to students engaging in correlated behaviors and in matching and instrumental variable models, suggesting that sadness causally reduces academic performance.

Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology

The CHAT Database looks very useful, particularly for those of you who like instruments (you know who you are!) :

This note accompanies the Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset. CHAT is an unbalanced panel dataset with information on the adoption of over 100 technologies in more than 150 countries since 1800. The data is available for download at: http://www.nber.org/data/chat We discuss the main aim of CHAT, its scope and limitations, as well as several ways in which we have used the data so far and ways to potentially use the data for other research.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15319

Previous Fortnights NBER papers

the last two weeks NBER working papers are well worth catching up on if you are not currently drunk and/or fighting with relatives

http://www.nber.org/new.html#latest

papers include

- a recent paper examining the effects of grants on college enrollment using a Danish natural experiment

- a reexamination of the role of season of birth on later outcomes

- a paper on the work-place determinants of well-being