Chien-Tzu Cheng

I am an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Osaka in Japan.

My research interests focus on Health Economics and Labor Economics.

curriculum vitae
contact: chien-tzu_cheng(at)econ.osaka-u.ac.jp

Working Papers

The Impact of Home Pregnancy Testing on Fertility and Women's Later-Life Outcomes

[Draft available upon request.]

Home pregnancy tests give early fertility information and help women make timely family-planning decisions. This paper studies how the introduction of home pregnancy tests in the US in 1977 impacted fertility, early prenatal care, and later-life outcomes. Using county-level drugstore accessibility to approximate test availability, I document significant trend breaks in fertility rates after 1977 among women who had access to drugstores. The effects are the strongest for those aged 15–29 and concentrated among those with access to abortion services. In the long run, women exposed to home pregnancy tests were more likely to delay childbirth, participate in the labor force, and never marry; these women were also less likely to divorce.

See You at Night: Unintended Consequences of Raising Provider Payments for Nighttime Emergency Care

with Hsien-Ming Lien [Draft available upon request.]

Using administrative data from Taiwan’s single-payer healthcare system, this paper studies a 2010 reform that increased nighttime payments to emergency department (ED) physicians by 25 percent. Exploiting the resulting payment discontinuity, we employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) design and adopt an augmented local linear approach to address identification challenges inherent to time-based running variables. We find no effects on overall care provision or visit volume. Instead, we document a 33 percent increase in the share of low-acuity visits during nighttime hours, with no corresponding change among high-severity cases, consistent with hospitals strategically re-timing low-acuity patients to increase reimbursement. Using daytime visits as a within-hospital control in an event-study framework, we find little impact on hospitalization, length of stay, costs, or mortality up to one year after implementation. The results suggest no evidence of substitution between emergency and primary care, indicating that the observed responses reflect supply-side behavior rather than patient demand.

The Effects of Prenatal Care on Maternal and Infant Health: Evidence from the SARS Epidemic in Taiwan

with Shin-Yi Chou, Hsien-Ming Lien [Draft available upon request.]