Long-term Benefits of Breastfeeding: Impact on Education in Indonesia
By Natalie Gulrajani
Abstract
Healthy breastfeeding behaviors have been shown to produce many long-term health benefits
including improved cognition. This study uses data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey
(IFLS) to assess the longitudinal impact of exclusive breastfeeding duration and early life
breastfeeding practices on education. Though a positive correlation was found between
breastfeeding duration and years of schooling in naïve regressions, the significance and
magnitude of this effect decreased when household fixed effects were added. A stronger
correlation was found between early life breastfeeding and schooling, with income-stratified
results demonstrating that poorer households are potentially subject to greater benefits.
Professor Erica Field, Faculty Advisor
JEL classification: I0; I12; I21
Assessing the Impacts of an Aging Population on Rising Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Expenditures within the United States
By Rahul Sharma
This paper studies the impact of aging on rising healthcare and pharmaceutical expenditures in the United States with the goal of contextualizing the future burden of public health insurance on the government. Precedent literature has focused on international panels of multiple countries and hasn’t identified significant correlation between age and healthcare expenditures. This paper presents a novel approach of identifying this correlation by using a US sample population to determine if age impacts an individual’s consumption of healthcare services and goods. Results suggest that age has a significant impact on healthcare and pharmaceutical expenditures across private and public insurance.
Advisors: Gilliam D. Saunders-Schmidler and Grace Kim | JEL Codes: H51, H53, I12, I13, I18, I38
Understanding Financial Incentive Health Initiatives: The Impact of the Janani Suraksha Yojana Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Institutional Delivery Rates and Out-of- Pocket Health Expenditure
By Ritika Jain
Demand-side financing is a policy tool used by nations to incentivize utilization of public institutions, and India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) is one of the largest such financial incentive programs in the world. The program pays eligible pregnant women to deliver their babies in health institutions partnered with the program. This paper studies the impact of the JSY on changes in mothers’ health-seeking behavior to deliver in-facility and on the out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) for delivery that they incur. Using data from the most recent wave of India’s District-Level Household Survey conducted in 2007-08, this paper finds that the overall introduction of the program in districts in India does not lead to significant changes in institutional delivery or out-ofpocket expenditure outcomes. Further analysis of subpopulations shows that marginalized populations are responsive to JSY introduction in their district with increased probability of delivering in-facility of 1.10 – 3.40 percentage points. Lastly, results show that receiving JSY payments leads to a 1.34 percentage point increase in the probability of incurring OOPE, but a 4.81 percent decrease in the amount of OOPE incurred. The JSY is helping to reduce overall out-of-pocket spending on deliveries. However, the majority of program benefits are not reaching poor pregnant women as the JSY aims, communicating the need for improvement in population targeting.
Advisor: Alison Hagy, Kent Kimbrough, Manoj Mohanan | JEL Codes: C22, I12, I18 | Tagged: Conditional Cash Transfer, Demand-side Financing, Difference-in-difference-in-differences, Difference-in-differences, Healthcare Reform, Maternal Health
Integrating Medicare and Medicaid Healthcare Delivery and Reimbursement Policies for Dual Eligible Beneficiaries: A Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Managed Care
By Kan Zhang
The extreme underpricing of Chinese Initial Public Offerings in the early days of the Chinese equity markets was reduced by several reforms instituted by the Chinese government from around 2000 to 2002. These reforms reduced 1-day returns on IPOs from 295% to 72%. The reforms reduced IPO underpricing by decreasing the inequality between IPO supply and demand. These reforms, while announced between 2000 and 2002, likely took until around 2004 to take full effect. In addition to inequality between supply and demand, other factors such as information asymmetry and government/quality signaling contributed to underpricing both before and after the reforms.
Advisor: Frank Sloan | JEL Codes: D61, I0, I11, I12, I18 | Tagged: Dual Eligibles, Managed Care, Medicare
Possibility of Cost Offset in Expanding Health Insurance Coverage: Using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 2008
By Catherine Moon
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aims to substantially reduce the number of the
uninsured over time and asserts that the financial burden of extending insurance coverage to the
previously uninsured will be offset by the benefit of the attendant improvement in their health.
Motivated by this policy, I explore whether health-insurance status and type affect one’s likelihood of
improving or maintaining health using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data. I build a set of
ordered regression models for health-status transitions under the first-order Markov assumption and
estimate it using maximum likelihood estimation. I perform a series of likelihood ratio tests for pooling to determine whether the latent propensity index is the same between adjacent initial health-status groups. Empirical results imply that expanding health care to the unwillingly uninsured due to severe
economic constraints and extending the scope of public insurance to that of private insurance will lead to improvement or maintenance of health for the relatively healthy population, implying the possibility of cost off-set in the expansion of coverage and the extension of scope.
Advisor: Frank Sloan, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: C12, C25, I12, I13, I18 | Tagged: Health Insurance, Health Transition, Ordered Regression Model, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Self-Assessed Health Status, Test for Pooling Adjacent Ordinal Categories
