Child labor, school attendance and access to health care services by children: evidence from Ghana

The paper develops a simple two-period model relating child labor, child school attendance and child health care access in LDCs showing that child labor is positively correlated to access to health care services. In fact, higher medical expenditure generates better health and, therefore, higher child productivity. Accumulation of human capital, which generates higher future utility, comes at the expense of current productivity and consumption. The optimal choice of child labor is such that the marginal benefit of schooling is equal to the marginal productivity of child labor, which is enhanced by additional medical expenditure. Under this theoretical set-up we expect medical expenditure and child labor to be positively correlated, with parents caring more for their children if they contribute to household income. We explore these relationships using a micro data set from Ghana LSS for the year 1999. Empirical results confirm the model theoretical predictions.Child labor; Health care demand; Human capital; Latent variables; multivariate Probit; Unobserved heterogeneity; LDCs

Uncertainty about children's survival and fertility : a test using Indian microdata

The authors present a non-altruistic model of demand for children, in the presence of uncertainty about children's survival. Children are seen as assets, as they provide help during old age. If certain conditions are met, both the financial market, and the family network are used to transfer resources to old age. Theoretical predictions relative to the change in the mean, and variance of the survival rate are derived. The empirical analysis is based on data from the Human Development of India (HDI) Survey. Different models for count variables, such as Poisson, Hurdle, and ZI models have been employed in the empirical analysis. The results highlight the importance of the uncertainty about children's survival in determining parental choices, thus showing that realized, or expected children'sdeath, is not the only dimension that links fertility decision to children's mortality. The policy implications of such findings are briefly discussed.Youth and Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Population&Development,Environmental Economics&Policies,Adolescent Health

Technology shocks, structural breaks and the effects on the business cycle.

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of technology shocks as source of the business cycle in two ways. First, we document that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60’s, which is likely due to a major change in the monetary policy. Second, we show that the importance of demand shocks over the business cycle has sharply increased after the break.Business cycle, technology shocks, structural breaks.

Who is responsible for your health: is it you, your doctor or the new technologies?

The aim of the paper is to disentangle the roles that patients, physicians and technology can have on patient health outcomes. The analysis focuses on patients suffering from hypercholesterolemia. Using a large and detailed dataset of patients collected by the Italian College of General Practitioners (SIMG) over the period 2001–2006, we observe the existence of heterogeneity in the time needed to reach an optimal level of health stock. We firstly explore whether patients recovering faster exhibit lower hospitalization rates. Secondly, we study the determinants of the speed of recovery to a good health status. Results suggest that a 10 % increase in the speed of recovery reduces hospitalization rates by 1 % in the general sample and by 1.25 % in patients in primary prevention. Furthermore, we show that recovering to a good health status is a multifaceted phenomenon, with technology explaining from 54 to 68 % of the total effect

Pharmaceutical Industry, Drug Quality and Regulation: Evidence from US and Italy

This paper examines the relationship between drug price and drug quality and how it varies across two of the most common regulatory regimes in the pharmaceutical market: minimum efficacy standards (MES) and a mix of minimum efficacy standards and price control mechanisms (MES+PC). Through a simple model of adverse selection we model the interaction between firms, heterogeneous buyers and the regulator. The theoretical analysis provides two results. First, an MES regime provides greater incentives to produce high quality drugs. Second, an MES+PC mix reduces the difference in price between the highest and lowest quality drugs on the market. The empirical analysis based on US and Italian data corroborates these results.

When elders rule: is gerontocracy harmful for growth?

We study the relationship between gerontocracy and aggregate economic perfomance in a simple model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation and productive government spending. We show that gerontocratic élites display the tendency to underinvest in public education and productive government services and thereby may be harmful growth. In absence of intergenerational altruism, the damage caused by gerontocracy is mainly due to the lack in long-term delayed-return investment originated by the shorter life horizon of the ruling class with respect to the rest of the population. An empirical analysis is carried out on a rich data set that al lows to test theoretical results across different countries and different sectors. The econometric results confirm our main hypotheses

Precautionary saving and health risk evidence from the Italian households using a time series of cross sections

In this paper we analyse the importance of precautionary saving in Italy. In contrast to previous studies, we focus on two contemporaneous sources of uncertainty, income and health expenditures, to explain the presence of precautionary saving. The major changes occurred in public health care policies from 1985 to 1996 have caused households to pay a larger share of their out-of-the-pocket medical expenditures. These events have caused households to face both a higher expected mean and a larger variance of health expenditures. Moreover, the economic recession occurred in the early ‘90s and the Maastricht requirements led to general worsening of future expectations of income. We therefore expect consumers to react to this uncertainty by generating precautionary saving. We test this prediction using an Euler equation augmented with the presence of the variance of income and health expenditure shocks. By using a time series of cross sections from the ISTAT household budget survey, we find strong support for precautionary saving as a response to health uncertainty

The Relationship between health policies, medical technology trend, and outomes: a perspective from the TECH Global Research Network

Although technological change is a hallmark of health care world-wide, relatively little evidence exists on whether changes in health care differ across the very different health care systems of developed countries. We present new comparative evidence on heart attack care in seventeen countries showing that technological changeâ changes in medical treatments that affect the quality and cost of careâ is universal but has differed greatly around the world. Differences in treatment rates are greatest for costly medical technologies, where strict financing limits and other policies to restrict adoption of intensive technologies have been associated with divergences in medical practices over time. Countries appear to differ systematically in the time at which intensive cardiac procedures began to be widely used and in the rate of growth of the procedures. The differences appear to be related to economic and regulatory incentives of the health care systems and may have important economic and health consequences