Australian Health & Human Capital Economics Seminar
University of Melbourne - University of New South Wales - University of Sydney - University of Technology Sydney - University of Queensland
Welcome to the Virtual Australian Health & Human Capital Economics Seminar Series. This event is organised by A/Professor Victoria Baranov (UMelb), Dr Tess Stafford (UNSW), Professor Stefanie Schurer (USyd), Dr Valentina Duque (USyd), Professor Adeline Delavande (UTS), and Professor Brenda Gannon (UQ).
With closed borders comes an immediate stop of ideas produced abroad flowing into Australia. To continue ideas exchange and institutional connection with the rest of the world, we have thus invited scientists from abroad to present and discuss their research on health and human capital economics -- virtually -- to an Australian audience.
The seminar series is open to the public. Sign up HERE for mailing list.
When, How Long & How to Access? We meet every second Friday for 60 minutes. The start time depends on the speaker (but no later than 4 pm Sydney/Melbourne time). Reminder emails will be sent out via email. Questions? Please email stefanie.schurer@sydney.edu.au for questions.
6 Aug - 11 AM: David Slusky (University of Kansas) Zoom Link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84141406437 Title: Office Visits Preventing Emergency Room Visits: Evidence From the Flint Water Switch
UPCOMING SEMINARS
20 Aug - 4 PM: Sule Alan (European University Institute) Zoom link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/86749083179 Title: Improving Workplace Climate in Large Corporations: A Clustered Randomized Intervention Abstract: We evaluate the impact of a program that aims to improve workplace climate in large corporations. The program is implemented via a clustered randomized design and evaluated with respect to the prevalence of support networks, antisocial behavior, perceived relational atmosphere, and turnover rate. We find that professionals in treated corporations are less inclined to engage in toxic competition, exhibit higher reciprocity toward each other, report higher workplace satisfaction and a more collegial atmosphere. Treated firms have fewer socially isolated individuals and lower employee turnover. The program's success in improving leader-subordinate relationships emerges as a likely mechanism to explain these results.
3 Sep - 9.30 AM: Pascaline Dupas (Stanford University) Zoom link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88307140430 Title: Women Left Behind: Gender Disparities in Utilization of Government Health Insurance in India. Abstract: Using administrative data on over 4 million hospital visits, we document striking gender disparities within a government health insurance program that entitles 46 million poor individuals to free hospital care in Rajasthan, India. Females account for only 33% of hospital visits among children and 43% among the elderly. These shares are lower for more expensive types of care, and far lower than sex differences in illness prevalence can explain. Almost two-thirds of non-childbirth spending is on males. We combine these data with patient survey, census, and electoral data to show that 1) the program is unable to fully offset the costs of care-seeking, which results in disparities in hospital utilization because some households are willing to allocate more resources to male than female health; 2) lowering costs does not reduce disparities, because males benefit as much as females do; and 3) long-term exposure to village-level female leaders reduces the gender gap in utilization, but effects are modest and limited to girls and young women. In the presence of gender bias, increasing access to and subsidizing social services may increase levels of female utilization but fail to address gender inequalities without actions that specifically target females.
17 Sep - 10 AM: Sara Markowitz (Emory University) Zoom link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88112621443 Title: Racial Disparities in Maternal Morbidity in the U.S. Abstract: Amid long standing improvements in life expectancy and infant mortality in the United States, a discordant new trend has emerged -- maternal mortality and morbidity are on the rise. Concurrent with this trend is evidence of racial disparities, particularly among non-Hispanic black women, who are experiencing these adverse outcomes at much higher rates than other groups. These phenomena are only beginning to be studied and understood by researchers. The medical causes of maternal mortality and morbidity are easily identified, but an explanation of the underlying reasons is lacking. In previous studies that document trends in maternal mortality and morbidity, researchers have hypothesized that factors contributing to these trends include older maternal age, increased body weight, cigarette and illegal drug use during pregnancy, low SES, structural racism, and issues related to providers and medical care. However, we currently have little guidance from the literature on which factors are the most influential or where policy interventions can be most beneficial. The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first is to conduct an exploratory analysis of the determinants of maternal mortality and morbidity in an effort to identify the factors that may or may not contribute to the underlying causes. We group potential explanatory variables into maternal characteristics, hospital characteristics, variables reflecting access to care, and community-level measures of the socioeconomic environment. The second is to investigate the sources of racial disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity. To accomplish these aims, we generate rates of maternal morbidity and mortality for 1998-2011 using the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS). We will combine this data with additional information from the patient, hospital, and the larger community (the county). We estimate the contributions of the different variables and variable groups to the overall variation in morbidity and mortality rates across hospitals and within hospitals over time. We will then use regression-based re-weighting techniques to examine the sources of racial disparities. Preliminary results show that maternal-level characteristic have the most explanatory power and that adding in the hospital-level characteristics do not add much to the explanatory power of the model. In addition, the chronic conditions of liver disease and kidney failure have large coefficients meaning that these two pre-existing conditions are likely strong predictors of the occurrence of severe maternal morbidity. Having a C-section is also a strong indicator. Results also indicate that rates of SMM among Black mothers are about twice that of White mothers; during our sample period, about 2 percent of Black mothers experienced SMM versus about 1 percent of White mothers. Although SMM has been increasing over time in all groups, the racial gap has been widening since 2007. About half of the racial gap in SMM between 2002 and 2015 can be explained by a group of variables measuring maternal socio-demographic and health characteristics, hospital characteristics, and community characteristics. The most important maternal contributors to the racial gap in SMM are insurance status, method of delivery, and a co-morbid condition, anemia. At the hospital level, giving birth in a hospital that serves predominantly Black mothers plays an important role, as does community poverty. The widening SMM gap between 2002 and 2015, however, cannot be explained well by changes in the distributions of observable characteristics over time.
1 Oct - 10 AM: Michele Belot (Cornell University) Zoom Link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88057438880 Title: Changing Dietary Habits: A Field Experiment with Low Income Families. Abstract: We evaluate two interventions aimed at encouraging healthier dietary among low SES children. In one treatment, families received food groceries at home for free for twelve weeks and were asked to prepare five specific healthy meals per week. In the other treatment, families were instructed to avoid snacking between meals and to eat at regular times, also for twelve weeks. We evaluate the interventions over the course of three years. We find that the distribution of children's body mass index shifts to the left relative to the control group, a difference that persists for three years for the first intervention, but fades away for the second. We also find children consume less added sugar, but we find little evidence that preferences changed in favor of healthier foods. The evidence for parents shows no coherent picture of changes in diet, and no effect on BMI, at any point over the course of the three years.
BelotAHHCES1Oct2021.mp4NOTE: Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra have changed to Daylight Savings Time on 3 October 2021
8 Oct - 10 AM: Heather Royer (University of California Santa Barbara) Zoom Link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88351788156 Title: Is Parental Leave Costly for Firms and Coworkers? Abstract: Most of the existing evidence on the effectiveness of family leave policies comes from studies focusing on their impacts on affected families—that is, mothers, fathers, and their children—without a clear understanding of the costs and effects on firms and coworkers. We use data from Denmark to evaluate the effect on firms and coworkers when a worker gives birth and goes on leave. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences design, we compare small firms in which a female employee is about to give birth to an observationally equivalent sample of small firms with female employeeswho are not close to giving birth. Identification rests on a parallel trends assumption, which we substantiate through a set of natural validity checks. When an employee gives birth she goes onleave from her firm for 9.5 months on average. Firms respond by increasing their labor inputs along several margins such that the net effect on total work hours is close to zero. Firms’ total wage bill increases in response to leave take up, but this is driven entirely by wages paid to workers on leave for which firms receive reimbursement. There are no measurable effects on firm output, profitability or survival. Finally, coworkers of the woman going on leave see temporary increases in their hours, earnings, and likelihood of being employed but experience no significant changes in well-being at work as proxied by sick days. Overall, our results suggest that employees going on parental leave impose negligible costs on their firm and coworkers. Link to Paper
15 Oct - 9.30 AM: Emilia Simeonova (Johns Hopkins University) Zoom Link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83880331503 Title: Selection and Causation in the Parental Education Gradient in Health: Lessons from a Large Sample of Adoptees. Abstract: We use data from a large sample of adoptees born in Sweden to study to what extent the well-established association between parental educational attainments and adult health of the child generation can be attributed to pre- or post-birth factors. We find a significant association between the educational attainment of the adopting parents and child health outcomes as adults. These results suggest that growing up in a better-educated household has long-term effects on health outcomes. Our analysis of the mechanisms behind the results suggests that the influence of the family environment on the formation of human capital, and in particular cognitive and non-cognitive skills, is an important contributor to long-term health. Paper available as NBER working paper 28214.
29 Oct - 10 AM: Matt Wiswall (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Zoom Link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/81827153420 Title: How Do Parents Choose Schools? Abstract: We analyze families' preferences for school characteristics using data from an urban school district in the United States. This district operates a public school choice system with a centralized school assignment process. Parents rank the public schools in the district and an algorithm assigns students to schools based on parental preferences, school capacity constraints and district priorities. In Fall 2018 we surveyed parents as they made these rankings. Our survey asked parents for their beliefs about the characteristics of the schools they were choosing and their beliefs about their children’s outcomes were they to attend these schools. The survey also include a discrete choice experiment that asked parents to compare hypothetical schools. We match these survey data to administrative data on parents’ real choices and other information from student records, including ethnicity, proxies for socio-economic status and test scores. We use these matched data to analyse parents' preferences for school characteristics.
12 Nov - 10 AM: Kosali Simon (Indiana University) Zoom Link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/81644763037 Title How do people value Covid-19 risks? Evidence from contingent valuation experiments. Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic increased the health risks associated with many of the daily activities of life. The effort to mitigate these risks led to substantial behavioral changes over the course of the epidemic. Aggregate levels of physical mobility declined substantially, many people shifted to remote work, and people started to wear masks in public places. At the individual level, responses to the epidemic were highly varied. Many people appear to have voluntarily altered their behavior to reduce their risk of exposure. Other people were more willing to bear the increased risk without major changes in behavior. More recently, the availability of an effective Covid-19 vaccine has started to replace social distancing as the main social response to the epidemic. But demand for the vaccine is quite heterogeneous. Some people are eager to be vaccinated and others are hesitant or actively opposed to vaccination. In this paper, we report results from a collection of contingent valuation survey experiments that shed light on the distribution of willingness to pay for various types of vaccine related risk mitigation strategies. The results suggest that willingness to pay for the vaccine varies substantially across the population. Our results suggest that -- even among the over 65 sub-populations, which has high risk of Covid-19 mortality – a large fraction of people are willing to pay less than $50 for the Covid-19 vaccine. At the same time , a substantial number of older people are willing to pay more than $500 for the vaccine. Younger people who have lower mortality risk tend to have even lower willingness to pay for vaccination. Scaling the willingness to pay estimates by publicly salient estimates of age-adjusted mortality rates provides estimates of the value of statistical life implied by the contingent valuation experiments. We use these numbers from the median willingness to pay to back out a value of statistical life in the under 65 and over 65 populations.
26 Nov - 11 AM John Klopfer (University of Hong Kong). https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88417155147 Title: Learning Time and Achievement: Evidence from a Nationwide Natural Experiment. Abstract: How much do students learn from an additional day of instruction? This paper uses the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to measure baseline achievement gains from additional instruction. I identify gains using demonstrably random variation in assessment dates, which gives some students more time to prepare for assessments. In mathematics, 4th and 8th grade students gain 0.80 and 0.40 standard deviations per year; in reading, gains are 0.50 and 0.25 standard deviations per year. I provide evidence that declining learning rates across grade levels cannot be explained by measurement per se, that students' ability is diverging within school years, and that ability divergence is masked by teaching to the test. I discuss implications for other findings in the education literature: for example, when measured in standard deviations, black-white achievement gaps are steady from 4th to 8th grade. But measured in units of time, black-white achievement gaps double from 4th to 8th grade, from 1 to 2 years to close the gap in math, and from 1.5 to 3 years to close the gap in reading.
John Klopfer AHHCES.mp410 Dec - 9 AM: Manuela Angelucci (University of Texas at Austin) Zoom Link https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/82875873755 Title: The Economic Impact of Depression Treatment in India Abstract: This study evaluates the impact of depression treatment on economic behavior in Karnataka, India. We cross-randomized pharmacotherapy and livelihoods assistance among 1000 depressed adults and evaluated impacts on depression severity, socioeconomic outcomes, and several potential pathways over 26 months. The pharmacotherapy treatments reduce depression severity, with benefits that persist after treatment concludes. They substantially increase child human capital investment, particularly for older children, and reduce risk intolerance and the incidence of negative shocks. These findings suggest two pathways through which depression may perpetuate poverty.