Five awards were made by the Center for the 2001-2002 funding cycle. Please contact the individual researchers for more information.
Families that live near a financial institution that offers savings accounts have smaller effects of a health shock on consumption, apparently due to the higher likelihood of having non-trivial financial assets. Paul Gertler (Business/Public Health; gertler@haas.berkeley.edu), David Levine (Business; levine@haas.berkeley.edu), and Enrico Moretti hope to examine the role of financial capital and social capital in insuring and self-insuring against shocks to child health in Indonesian families. Child health outcomes such as height-for-age and weight-for-height will be used to determine if financial resources can protect child health as well.
To what extent does direct-to-consumer advertising increase the utilization of advertised drugs? Paul Gertler (Business/Public Health; gertler@haas.berkeley.edu) and Marta Wosinka will investigate the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising on prescription drug choice. Does direct-to-consumer advertising undermine the insurers' efforts to induce price sensitivity in prescription behavior?
Good doctor-patient communication is important because of patients' emotional reactions to medical situations. Current economic theory has no serious treatment of feelings as distinct from other kinds of outcomes. In addition, there are no studies of doctor-patient relationships that address specific questions of information exchange. Botond Köszegi (Economics; botond@econ.berkeley.edu) will seek to test physician responses against an economic model that isolates the behavioral consequences of patient medical anxiety and physician behavior.
Edward Miguel (Economics; emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu) and Michael Kremer will research an ongoing health program in 75 rural Kenyan primary schools, investigating the determinants of health behavior, in particular the adoption of deworming drugs. Various aspects of individual health practices will be examined, including the roles of information diffusion, peer effects, price factors, and the influence of social networks.
Jonah D. Levy's (Political Science; jlevy@socrates.berkeley.edu) study of welfare state reform policies will be part of a broader book project on the center-left governments of three European countries: France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Using very different methods, these nations have pursued the goals of reduced government spending and more flexible labor markets, but have done so in ways that preserve or even enhance equality and protections for the disadvantaged. Further information on these methods will be gained from interviews with local scholars and health care leaders.
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