Full Citation

Title: Essays on Health and Labor Policies

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: This dissertation consists of three papers on health economics and labor economics. The first chapter investigates how workplace breastfeeding laws that require firms to provide a lactation room in the workplace affect the labor market outcomes of mothers of infants. Summers (1989) predicts that such mandated benefits depress the demand for mothers of infants and increase their supply and, thus, depress wages. However, I argue that such mandated benefits can increase both the demand for and the wages of mothers of infants who have a strong propensity to increase their work attachment. I exploit the plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of state mandates on workplace lactation support, analyzing data in the National Immunization Survey and the Current Population Survey. The second chapter investigates changes in the usage or preventive services among the Medicare beneficiaries following the Affordable Care Act’s “Medicare Preventive Benefits” reform, which eliminates cost-sharing for Medicare-covered preventive services that are recommended (rated A or B) by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Following intuition in Chetty et al. (2013) that individuals with no knowledge of certain policies behave as they would in the absence of the policy, I identify the impact of the reform by comparing the usage of all Medicare-covered preventive services across regions with different levels of knowledge of the reform. Exploiting the sample of beneficiaries that move across HRRs, I find that the knowledge of the reform is driven by the demand side factors rather than the supply side factors. The third chapter investigates the causal impact of physician counseling on obesity, exploiting the eligibility criterion of the Medicare’s Intensive Behavioral Therapy (IBT) for Obesity program, using a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity (RD) approach. I using the 5% random sample of the Medicare historical claim data and I inventively collect the BMI information using the ICD-9 diagnosis codes. I find that the intensive behavioral therapy is not effective in reducing obesity, and we are able to rule out confounding factors such as the use of bariatric procedures, massages, psychological therapy, smoking counseling, and the diagnoses of chronic conditions.

Url: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/30899/7/ETD_SiyingLiu.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Liu, Siying

Institution: University of Pittsburgh

Department: Economics

Advisor: Daniel Berkowitz

Degree: Doctor of PHilosophy

Publisher Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Pages: 229

Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS CPS

Topics: Health, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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