Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Economics

Committee Chair

Albert A Okunade

Committee Member

Ebenezer George

Committee Member

William Smith

Committee Member

Joonhyung Lee

Committee Member

Ebenezer George

Abstract

This Dissertation consists of three essays on health, labor, and public economics. The first essay investigates how gender-specific cancers affect the labor market outcomes of cancer survivors. Using a theoretical construct of labor supply and health capital, this essay exploits a nationally representative dataset, the 20082015 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), for estimating the correlated random effects (CRE) and over-dispersion empirical models to capture the job market effects for cancer survivors. After addressing the potential endogeneity of cancer and controlling for the number of years after cancer diagnoses, the estimated CRE model detect substantial male-female differences in the labor market outcomes for the survivors.The second essay, also using the 2008-2014 MEPS dataset, examines the post-cancer variations in job market outcomes of racial and ethnic minorities in the US. The empirical estimates of the double-hurdle model show that Black breast cancer survivors are less likely to be employed by 4% and 7.5%, respectively, when compared with Whites. Conditional on employment, Black and Hispanic breast cancer survivors work an extra 4 and 6 hours than Whites, while Hispanic prostate cancer survivors work 5 fewer weekly hours than Whites. In addition, the estimates indicate the significance of job types in labor market outcomes post-cancer. Employment of minorities in blue collar or service occupations decreased employment hours of the survivors.The third essay presents results from a large-scale randomized experiment across 6,848 households in Afghanistan by evaluating the impact of a conditional incentive pay scheme to the health facilities. Supported by the target income hypothesis framework and relaxing the compliance assumption in the empirical modeling, the estimated coefficients yield causal effects of supply-side conditional incentive on the demand for healthcare services. After two years, the conditional incentive led to induce the demand for targeted maternal and children healthcare services among the users at lower levels and contracted-out health facilities. Further, the incentive scheme is associated with sizable efficiency gains at facility level. These gains are realized at the expense of deterring service users satisfaction with the physicians communication qualities. This study establishes that margins of improvement do exist on the supply-side performance conditioning on organizational structure and the service contractual arrangements of health facilities.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest

Notes

embargoed

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