Search Results
Working Paper
Social networks and vaccination decisions
We combine information on social networks with medical records and survey data in order to examine how friends affect one's decision to get vaccinated against the flu. The random assignment of undergraduates to residential halls at a large private university allows us to estimate how peer effects influence health beliefs and vaccination choices. Our results indicate that social exposure to medical information raises people's perceptions of the benefits of immunization. The average student's belief about the vaccine's health value increases by $5.00 when an additional 10 percent of her friends ...
Working Paper
Health care costs, wages, and aging
While economists generally agree that workers pay for their health insurance costs through reduced wages, there has been little thought devoted to the level at which these costs are passed on: Is each employee's wage reduced by the amount of his or her own health costs, by the average health costs of employees in the firm, or by some amount in between? This paper analyzes one dimension of the question of how firms pass health costs to workers. Using cross-city variation in health costs, I test whether older workers pay for their higher health costs in the form of lower wages. I find that in ...
Journal Article
Economic inequality and social differentials in mortality
This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 1, "Health status of children and households in poverty." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. This paper discusses health as a direct measure of economic well-being and draws attention to those suffering the worst outcomes. The author identifies a set of young people at particular risk of high mortality rates. She observes that in some U.S. communities - especially urban areas in the North - young ...
Newsletter
Check Up Before You Check Out
Retail clinics offer convenient, low-cost preventive health care and treatment for minor injury and illness. When a retail clinic opens, the rate of visits to the emergency room for these low-severity conditions declines for people who live in close proximity.
Journal Article
Righting the scales: the search for balance in health care
Journal Article
Diagnosis: shortage
Journal Article
Public health and the public agenda
This paper was presented as the distinguished address at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The author examines health issues, observing that infant mortality rates for African-Americans are twice as high as they are for white Americans; Chinese-Americans are four to five times more likely to suffer from liver cancer than other Americans; and Latinos and Native Americans develop diabetes at a rate twice and three times the U.S. average, ...
Journal Article
Long-term health care: is social insurance desirable?
A look at why the private insurance market has failed to cover long-term care risks adequately, and an evaluation of several proposals for funding such care through social insurance.
Journal Article
Biotech bonanza: prospects for Texas