PUBLICATIONS

Research on Vietnam

[RISE Working Paper]

Dang, Hai-Anh; Glewwe, Paul; Lee, Jongwook; Vu, Khoa. 

Abstract: Despite being the poorest or second poorest participant, Vietnam performed much better than all other developing countries, and even ahead of wealthier countries such as the US and the UK, on the 2012 and 2015 PISA assessments. We provide a rigorous investigation of Vietnam's strong performance. After making various parametric and non-parametric corrections for potentially non-representative PISA samples, including bias due to Vietnam's large out-of-school population, Vietnam still remains a large positive outlier conditional on its income. Possible higher motivation of, and coaching given to, Vietnamese students only partly explains Vietnam's performance, and this is also the case for various observed household-and school-level variables. Finally, Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions indicate that the gap in average test scores between Vietnam and the other participating countries is due not to differences in students' and schools' observed characteristics, but instead to Vietnam's greater" productivity" of those characteristics.


[Article] | [WIDER Working Paper].

Vu, Khoa; Glewwe, Paul. 

Abstract: Despite a sizable literature on the labor market effects of maternity leave regulation on women in developed countries, how these policies affect women's work in developing countries with a large informal sector remains poorly understood. This study examines how extending the maternity leave requirement affects women's decision to work in the informal or formal sector in Vietnam. We use a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the 2012 Amendments to the Vietnam Labor Law, which imposes a longer maternity leave requirement than before. We find that the law increases formal employment and decreases unpaid work among women. This is driven by women switching from agricultural household work to employment in the private formal sector, especially in the manufacturing industry and among the middle-skilled occupations such as plant and machine workers, craft and related workers, as well as clerks.


[Article] | [WP version]

Vu, Khoa; Vuong, Nguyen; Nguyen, Ngoc-Anh; Vu-Thanh, Tu-Anh.

Abstract: As COVID-19 threatens the food security of vulnerable populations across the globe, there is an increasing need to identify places that are affected most in order to target aid. We propose a two-step approach to predict changes in food insecurity risk caused by income shocks at a locality level only using existing household-level data and external information about income shocks. Using national household survey data between 2010 and 2018, we find that a 10% decrease in income leads to a 3.5% increase in food insecurity. We use the 2019 national Labor Force Survey to predict changes in food insecurity risk caused by the income shocks during the pandemic for 702 districts in Vietnam. We find that the small, predicted change in food insecurity at the national level masks substantial variation at the district level, and changes in food insecurity risk are higher among young children. Food relief policies, therefore, should prioritize a small number of districts predicted to be severely affected.


[Article] | [WP version]

Bellemare, Marc F., Kenn Chua, Julieth Santamaria, and Khoa Vu  

Abstract: In Vietnam, all lands belong to the state, which assigns usufruct rights to those lands to individuals and households. In 1993, the state gave 20-year usufruct rights to growers of annual crops, and 50-year usufruct rights to growers of perennial crops. In 2013, as the usufruct rights of growers of annual crops were about to expire, the Vietnamese government passed a law—the Land Law of 2013—that extended the usufruct rights of all landowners by 50 years. We exploit this largely unanticipated shock to study the effect of tenurial security on agricultural investment. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that the Land Law of 2013 is associated with a higher likelihood of investment by growers of annual crops in irrigation technology or soil and water conservation, but not other types of investment. Our results are robust to controlling for endogenous switching from annual to perennial crops, and our data support the parallel trends assumption. 


Research on the US

[Article]

Zhu Y, Caroll C., Vu K, Sen Soumya S, Georgiou A, Karaca-Mandic P. 

Abstract: Since the summer of 2020, the rate of coronavirus cases in the United States has been higher in rural areas than in urban areas, raising concerns that patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) will overwhelm under-resourced rural hospitals. Using data from the University of Minnesota COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, we document disparities in COVID-19 hospitalization rates between rural and urban areas. We show that rural-urban differences in COVID-19 admission rates were minimal in the summer of 2020 but began to diverge in fall 2020. Rural areas had statistically higher hospitalization rates from September 2020 through early 2021, after which rural-urban admission rates re-converged. The insights in this article are relevant to policymakers as they consider the adequacy of hospital resources across rural and urban areas during the COVID-19 pandemic.


[Article]

Vu, Khoa; Zhou J; Everhart A; Desai N; Herrin J; Jena A-B; Ross J; Shah N; Karaca-Mandic P. 

Abstract: Variation in de-adoption of ineffective or unsafe treatments is not well-understood. We examined de-adoption of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESA) in anemia treatment among patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) following new clinical evidence of harm and ineffectiveness (the TREAT trial) and the FDA’s revision of its safety warning. We used a segmented regression approach to estimate changes in use of epoetin alfa (EPO) and darbepoetin alfa (DPO) in the commercial, Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) populations. We also examined how changes in both trends and levels of use were associated with physicians’ characteristics.


[Article] | [NBER Working paper]

Sacks, Daniel; Vu, Khoa; Huang, Tsan-Yao; Karaca-Mandic, Pinar

Abstract: Many insurance markets have reinstated premium stabilization programs to ensure financial protection from market volatility. In this paper, we focus on one such regulation—risk corridors (RCs)—in the context of the Health Insurance Marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act. We develop a model to show how the program provided incentives for some insurers to lower their premiums. The RCs program was defunded unexpectedly for coverage year 2016, before its legislated end in 2016. Consistent with the model, we find that making a RCs claim before the program ended is associated with higher premium growth after the program's demise. The model and empirical evidence are consistent with the view that the end of the RCs program contributed to premium growth in the Marketplaces.


[Article]

Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Archelle Georgiou, Soumya Sen, Yi Zhu, Khoa Vu, and Alexander Everhart