We examine the effect of New York City's universal pre-kindergarten program (UPK) on the health and utilization of children enrolled in Medicaid using a difference-in-regression- discontinuities design. We find that UPK increases the probability that a child is diagnosed with asthma or with...

This chapter surveys experience with performance pay in developing country health programs. In doing so, it focuses on four key conceptual issues: (1) What to reward, (2) Who to reward, (3) How to reward, and (4) What unintended consequences might performance incentives create. We highlight that...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

Medical and public health innovations in the 1940s quickly resulted in significant health improvements around the world. Countries with initially higher mortality from infectious diseases experienced greater increases in life expectancy, population, and - over the following 40 years - social...

Since 2003, Zambia has been engaged in a large-scale, centrally coordinated national anti-Malaria campaign which has become a model in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper aims at quantifying the individual and macro level benefits of this campaign, which involved mass distribution of insecticide...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically estimate the propensity for alcohol-related policies to influence rates of entry into foster care and the length of time spent in foster care. Alcohol consumption is believed to be major contributing factor to child maltreatment, associated with an...

This paper examines the trade-off between the length of treatment days and the units of service provided per day for elderly patients in the context of the initiative taken by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan to discourage lengthy hospital treatment and/or stay by elderly patients. By...

The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement resolved the unprecedented litigation in which the states sought to recoup the cigarette-related Medicaid costs. The litigation was settled through a combination of negotiated regulatory requirements and financial payments of about $250 billion over 25 years....

We document the impact of the AIDS crisis on non-AIDS related health services in fourteen sub-Saharan African countries. Using multiple waves of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for each country, we examine antenatal care, birth deliveries, and rates of immunization for children born between...

We use novel data to study the decision to undergo genetic testing by individuals at risk for Huntington disease (HD), a hereditary neurological disorder that reduces healthy life expectancy to about age 50. Although genetic testing is perfectly predictive and carries little financial or time...