This paper examines the health effects of Caesarean section (CS) for children and their mothers. We use exogenous variation in the probability of CS in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. Using administrative Danish data, we exploit an information shock for obstetricians that sharply...

This paper investigates the leave-out strategy of instruments by using the leave-out community ratio of household access to in-yard water sources and community water infrastructure as instruments for hours in fetching water time, and the data on disease symptoms. The results show that...

Globally, suicide has emerged as the second leading cause of death among youth aged 10–24 years old. In order to better understand the causes of this phenomenon, we investigate the relationship between suicidal ideation and cannabis use. Our empirical analysis is based on a 30-year...

I investigate how changes in fees paid to Medicaid physicians affect take-up among children in low-income families. The existing literature suggests that the low level of Medicaid fee payments to physicians reduces their willingness to see Medicaid patients, thus creating an access-to-care...

Crowd-out, the switching from private to public insurance, is often found, but estimates are rarely consistent with prior measurements. Cutler and Gruber (1996) found crowd-out in up to half of the newly eligible children, while Card and Shore-Sheppard (2004) found almost none. This paper...

The new comprehensive health reform, beginning in 2014, will require Medicaid to expand all elements of coverage to individuals with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line. With millions more individuals gaining eligibility for adult Medicaid dental benefits, generating an...

Understanding what drives households to seek medical services is challenging because the factors affecting the perceived benefits and costs of professional health care can be the same. In this paper, we disentangle the channels through which different factors affect the use of medical services,...

Studies on health effects of unemployment usually neglect spillover effects on spouses. This study specifically investigates the effect of an individual's unemployment on the mental health of their spouse. In order to allow for causal interpretation of the estimates, it focuses on plant closure...

This paper uses data from the 1970 British Cohort Study to quantify the intergenerational persistence of mental health, and the long-run economic costs associated with poor parental mental health. We find a strong and significant intergenerational correlation that is robust to different...

Do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? We use exogenous variation in the interview dates of the 2008 Health and Retirement Study to assess the impact of large wealth losses on mental health among older U.S. adults. We compare cross-wave changes in wealth and mental health for...