Health Programme Evaluation by Propensity Score Matching: Accounting for Treatment Intensity and Health Externalities with an Application to Brazil

Most of the literature on health programme evaluation has estimated average programme impacts relying on either: (i) data on the presence or absence of an intervention in a particular locality, or (ii) data on individual participation in the health programme. By estimating an average health impact which is independent of the programmes population coverage, the empirical approaches of these studies overlook the important fact that public health interventions create externalities whose magnitude depends crucially on the number of covered individuals in a locality. The lain contributions of this paper are to suggest and apply an empirical approach for the impact evaluation of public health interventions which also takes into account treatment externalities, when non-experimental, routine data are available and under the assumption of average treatment effects by a propensity score matching-difference-in-differences estimator adapted to the case of multiple treatments, jointly evaluating the impact of different programme coverage levels. The methods are used to conduct an impact evaluation of the Family Health Programme (Programa Saude da Familia PSF), the broadest health programme ever launched in Brazil, on adult and child health. --health programme evaluation,multiple treatments,propensity score matching,Brazil

Europe and Central Asia's great post-communist social health insurance experiment : impacts on health sector and labor market outcomes

The post-communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health systems. This paper employs a regression-based generalization of the difference-in-differences method and instrumental variables on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990-2004. The authors find that, controlling for any concurrent provider payment reforms, adoption of social health insurance increased national health spending and hospital activity rates, but did not lead to better health outcomes. The authors also find that adoption of social health insurance reduced employment in the economy as a whole and increased unemployment, although it did not apparently increase the size of the informal economy.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Population Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Disease Control&Prevention

System-wide impacts of hospital payment reforms : evidence from central and eastern Europe and central Asia

Although there is broad agreement that the way that health care providers are paid affects their performance, the empirical literature on the impacts of provider payment reforms is surprisingly thin. During the 1990s and early 2000s, many European and Central Asian countries shifted from paying hospitals through historical budgets to fee-for-service or patient-based-payment methods (mostly variants of diagnosis-related groups). Using panel data on 28 countries over the period 1990-2004, the authors of this study exploit the phased shift from historical budgets to explore aggregate impacts on hospital throughput, national health spending, and mortality from causes amenable to medical care. They use a regression version of difference-in-differences and two variants that relax the difference-in-differences parallel trends assumption. The results show that fee-for-service and patient-based-payment methods both increased national health spending, including private (out-of-pocket) spending. However, they had different effects on inpatient admissions (fee-for-service increased them; patient-based-payment had no effect), and average length of stay (fee-for-service had no effect; patient-based-payment reduced it). Of the two methods, only patient-based-payment appears to have had any beneficial effect on"amenable mortality,"but there were significant impacts for only a couple of causes of death, and not in all model specifications.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Health Law,Population Policies

The Effects of Privatization on Firms and on Social Welfare: The Chilean Case

Chile led the Latin American pack in launching its far-reaching privatization program, but the question of whether the process has made firms more profitable remains. Also unclear is whether society as a whole is better off because of privatization. This paper looks at the performance of several industries to gauge the effects of privatization on Chilean firms and social welfare. The authors’ research, which is both broad and deep, yields some surprising findings. For example, contrary to commonly-held perceptions of bloated state-run bureaucracies, the authors find that the employment ranks of regulated entities actually swelled after their ownership switched to private hands. The paper evaluates a wide range of aspects of the privatization process, from highway tolls to private pension fund returns to school vouchers, and concludes with some concrete recommendations for future improvements.

El trabajo decente en el imaginario de la economía popular : sentidos de la hegemonía neoliberal en el mundo de las organizaciones sociales

En la presente ponencia se analiza la propuesta de la Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (CTEP) respecto del llamado trabajo decente en relación a las representaciones sobre el trabajo que se encuentran implicadas en ella. Así, mediante el análisis de los materiales de formación de CTEP y los documentos de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo se buscan los sentidos sobre el mundo del trabajo que este conjunto de organizaciones sociales y sus tensiones con una propuesta política mentada como emancipatoria.Fil: Serra, Hugo Rodrigo . Universidad Nacional de Villa María

La forma feria de la economía popular latinoamericana y el sujeto posneoliberal : Entre el comercio, el trabajo y la exclusión

El presente trabajo busca ser una contribución en la discusión más amplia respecto del sujeto de la economía popular latinoamericana ¿excluídos, microempresarios o trabajadores? A partir de ello se pretende explorar en la construcción de la subjetividad económica de los individuos que actúan en la Feria de economía popular de Villa el Libertador (Ciudad de Córdoba) adentrándonos en los roles y personajes que integran el entramado interaccional de ese espacio económico, teniendo como hipótesis el asenso de una subjetividad diferente que no puede reducirse a las perspectivas clásicas de abordar lo que los organismos internacionales llaman "economía informal

Death by Market Power. Reform, Competition and Patient Outcomes in the National Health Service

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The English government introduced a policy in 2006 to promote competition between hospitals. Patients were given choice of location for hospital care and provided information on the quality and timeliness of care. Prices, previously negotiated between buyer and seller, were set centrally under a DRG type system. Using this policy to implement a difference-in-differences research design we estimate the impact of the introduction of competition on not only clinical outcomes but also productivity and expenditure. Our data set is large, containing information on approximately 68,000 discharges per year per hospital from 160 hospitals. We find that the effect of competition is to save lives without raising costs. Patients discharged from hospitals located in markets where competition was more feasible were less likely to die, had shorter length of stay and were treated at the same cost.competition, hospitals, quality

Cryptocurrency price forecasting : an empirical application

Mestrado em Econometria Aplicada e PrevisãoA presente dissertação é desenvolvida no âmbito dos modelos Autorregressivo Integrado de Médias Móveis (ARIMA) e de Alisamento Exponencial, tendo como principal objetivo realizar uma comparação de métodos de previsão. Em particular, as previsões serão feitas usando essas diferentes classes de métodos e serão realizados exercícios de validação cruzada para encontrar o modelo de previsão mais adequado. O objeto de estudo serão ativos financeiros; especificamente, cinco criptomoedas (criptoativos) - Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, XRP e Bitcoin Cash - escolhidas com base na sua importância e representatividade. Os dados de preços utilizados são semanais. Foram apresentados os testes a ser efetuados ao logaritmo dos preços e dos retornos de cada criptomoeda, de modo a provar que se cumprem alguns factos estilizados das séries financeiras. Após a demostração dos resultados dos testes e da caracterização de cada ativo, é feita uma demonstração do código de R utilizado durante o trabalho. Os modelos que demonstraram ser mais adequados para prever os preços das criptomoedas em análise foram ARIMA de diferentes ordens, para cada ativo.This dissertation is developed within the scope of the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Exponential Smoothing models, with the main objective of comparing forecasting methods. In particular, forecasts will be made using these different classes of methods and cross-validation exercises will be performed to find the most suitable forecast model. Financial assets will be object of study; specifically, five (crypto) cryptocurrencies - Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, XRP and Bitcoin Cash - chosen based on their importance and representativity. The price data used are weekly. The tests to be carried out on the cryptocurrency's logarithm of prices and returns were presented, in order to prove that some stylized facts of the financial series are fulfilled. After showing the test results and the characterization of each asset, a demonstration of the R code used during the work is done. The models that proved to be more adequate to predict the prices of the cryptocurrencies under analysis were ARIMA models of different orders, for each asset.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Interface Homem-Máquina Multi Robótica em Unity3D

More than ever the use of autonomous vehicles to accomplish objectives deemed too dangerous or even impossible by human standards is increasing. This demand puts to the test our capabilities for managing teams of multiple robots and creating intuitive interactions with these teams is a must. Creating means to abstract and condense the information that reaches the end user into a single kit of software would improve its manageability considerably. The development of a centralized graphical user interface is proposed to alleviate the workload of the human operator. This interface is thought out to be simple in delivering its information taking cues from video games, a well known industry in studying the theory behind the creation of user interfaces. Sensorial information is abstracted in a graphical perspective much like the attributes of a character inside a video game. The Unity game engine was used to implement such an interface, integrating ROS with a layer of DDS to manage the communications while providing QoS settings. The DDS solves the problem of multiple ROS masters by setting up a separate network where users can connect and disconnect seamlessly from the network, without the need to restart roscore on each machine. Interactions between these two software is made by using websockets on a local network. Visual representations of the sensors onboard the autonomous vehicles transform the huge stream of data into human understandable formats for immediate response by the operator. Dynamic generation of terrain was accomplished by the use of LiDAR and side-scan sensors, if available, to map the surroundings, while Mapbox provided prefetched terrain data from OpenStreetMaps.Mais do que nunca, o uso de veículos autónomos para cumprir objectivos considerados demasiado perigosos ou até mesmo impossíveis segundo os padrões humanos tem vindo a aumentar. Este requerimento testa as nossas capacidades de gestão de equipas de múltiplos robôs e torna a criação de interações intuitivas com estas equipas numa necessidade. Criar meios de abstrair e condensar a informação que chega ao utilizador final num só pacote de software iria melhorar a sua gestão consideravelmente. O desenvolvimento de uma interface gráfica centralizada é proposta de modo a aliviar a carga de trabalho do operador humano. Esta interface é pensada para transmitir a sua informação como um vídeo jogo, sendo que esta é uma indústria que conhecida pelo seu estudo de interfaces de utilizador. Informação sensorial é abstraída com uma perspectiva gráfica tal como os atributos de uma personagem de um vídeo jogo. O motor de jogo Unity foi o utilizado para implementar tal interface integrando funcionalidades de ROS com uma camada de DDS, responsável pela gestão das comunicações, fornecendo opções de QoS. O DDS resolve o problema de múltiplos ROS master estabelecendo uma rede separada em que os utilizadores podem conectar-se e desconectar-se simultaneamente sem haver a necessidade de reiniciar o roscore em cada máquina. Interações entre os dois software é efetuada através de websockets numa rede local. Representações visuais dos sensores a bordo dos veículos autónomos transformam os enormes fluxos de dados em formatos facilmente compreensíveis por humanos para resposta imediata por parte do operador. Geração dinâmica de ambientes virtuais foi tornado possível com recurso a sensores como LiDAR e side-scan, caso existam, enquanto que API’s como Mapbox e OpenStreetMaps forneceram dados estáticos destes ambientes

Extending Eventually Consistent Cloud Databases for Enforcing Numeric Invariants

Geo-replicated databases often operate under the principle of eventual consistency to offer high-availability with low latency on a simple key/value store abstraction. Recently, some have adopted commutative data types to provide seamless reconciliation for special purpose data types, such as counters. Despite this, the inability to enforce numeric invariants across all replicas still remains a key shortcoming of relying on the limited guarantees of eventual consistency storage. We present a new replicated data type, called bounded counter, which adds support for numeric invariants to eventually consistent geo-replicated databases. We describe how this can be implemented on top of existing cloud stores without modifying them, using Riak as an example. Our approach adapts ideas from escrow transactions to devise a solution that is decentralized, fault-tolerant and fast. Our evaluation shows much lower latency and better scalability than the traditional approach of using strong consistency to enforce numeric invariants, thus alleviating the tension between consistency and availability