Home » Posts tagged 'Health'

Tag Archives: Health

The Neighborhood Effect on Health Outcomes for Women in Urban India

By Priyanka Venkannagari

The paper uses 2011 Indian Human Development Survey data to assess the impact of 5 categories of variables on health outcomes. It uses OLS models, interaction terms, instrumental variable models, fixed effects and random effects to investigate the existence of a neighborhood effect on health outcomes for women in urban India. This paper finds that various aspects of health practices, empowerment, amenities and financial security are relevant when looking at health outcomes. Interventions looking to address health outcomes should consider these variables and the compounding neighborhood effect.

View Thesis

View Data

Advisor: Charles Becker, Michelle Connolly, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: C36, I1, I12, O18

The Impact of State and Local Government Spending on Charitable Giving in the United States

By Lynn Vandendriessche

This paper seeks to further understand how government spending impacts private giving to charitable organizations. It considers giving and spending in the United States in 2008 with a focus on government spending on education, welfare, healthcare, and hospitals. Government spending is looked at at the state and local levels. The results indicate that the impact of government spending depends not only on the category of spending, but also on the income level of the giver. Increased welfare spending is shown to cause incomplete crowding-out across all income groups. Results consistently show education spending to cause crowding-out as well. The impact of both healthcare and hospital spending is more ambiguous, with differing results for different government levels (state and local) and income brackets.

View Thesis

Advisor: Michelle Connolly, Peter Arcidiacono | JEL Codes: L3, L31, L38 | Tagged: Altruism/Philanthropy, and Education, Charitable Giving, Health, Non-profit Institutions, Welfare

The Relationship between and Geographic Distribution of Breast Cancer Statistics: Diagnosis, Survival, and Mortality in Selected Areas in the United States, 1973-2004

By Timothy Rooney

Using breast cancer registry data from the United States and regression models controlling for race, marital status, and county-level variation, this research analyzes the connections between these statistics and the geographic variation of each of them. In doing so, it determines that stage of diagnosis has a significant impact on survival likelihood and the likelihood of death due to breast cancer. It also determines that survival reduces mortality likelihood. Additionally, it determines that stage of diagnosis, survival, and mortality all vary geographically, postulating that the reason for this variation is due to lifestyle variation and uneven medical talent distribution.

View Thesis

Advisor: Charles Becker, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: I1, I10, I19 | Tagged: Cancer, Diagnosis, Health, Mortality, Survival

Foreign Aid Allocation and Impact: A Sub-National Analysis of Malawi

By Rajlakshmi De

Understanding the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation is one of the central inquiries for development economics. To augment past cross-country studies and randomized evaluations, this project data from Malawi is used in combination with multiple rounds of living standards data to predict the allocation and impact of health aid, water aid, and education aid.  Both instrumentation and propensity score matching methods are used.

View Thesis

Advisor: Charles Becker | JEL Codes: F35, I15, I25, I32, O12 | Tagged: Development, Education, Foreign Aid, Health, Malawi, Water

Questions?

Undergraduate Program Assistant
Matthew Eggleston
dus_asst@econ.duke.edu

Director of the Honors Program
Michelle P. Connolly
michelle.connolly@duke.edu