Full Citation

Title: Essays on Incentives and Choice in Education and Health Economics

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2023

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DOI: 10.7302/8345

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Abstract: This dissertation consists of three chapters focusing on incentives and choices in the context of the economics of education and health economics. The first two chapters explore potential explanations underlying a puzzle in health economics: why do individuals appear to remain inadequately insured for their health? Furthermore, Chapters I and II explore the possible role of salient information about health, delivered to individuals in various forms, on health plan choices. Chapter III focuses on the socioeconomic and racial sorting effects of a policy that expanded school choice options for students attending low performing public schools. In Chapter I “Who Avoids Health Information? Experimental Evidence on Health Insurance Choice,” I explore the phenomenon of avoidance of information related to mortality, illness, and salient health events. Because information avoidance cannot be classified using existing observational data, I design an experiment to separate a group of “avoiders” and “non-avoiders” based on their willingness-to-pay to avoid uncomfortable or tedious information related to health. This approach enables me to document several observable traits about this newly defined group of “avoiders.” I simulate a potential future health shock for all respondents and I observe that insurance preferences of avoiders and non-avoiders appear to be different. I rule out the role of different information exposure in helping explain this modest, yet significant difference in insurance preferences. In Chapter II “Private Health Insurance Patterns Following Spousal Health Shocks,” I explore how individuals select private health plans after a spouse has experienced a hospital admission. I document a 7.4pp increase in private plan coverage, specifically for individuals who did not initially hold a private health plan when they entered the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study. Across all individuals, both the previously uninsured and those who held insurance, I observe an increased $82 annual premium associated with private plans, suggesting individuals switched towards more generous coverage as a result of the spousal hospital admission. While I cannot rule out other possible explanations, such as lowered transaction costs, these results are consistent with individuals responding to salient health information by selecting into higher levels of insurance coverage. Finally, in Chapter III “School Choice and Student Mobility from Low-Performing Schools: Evidence from the California Open Enrollment Act,” Hayley Abourezk-Pinkstone and I answer the question of how minority and low-income students respond to a policy incentive that allows them to transition to better-performing public schools of their choice. Using variation in the policy roll-out across different schools in different years, we find that minority and low-income students respond to the policy by exiting low-performing schools and substituting towards higher-performing schools. The effect is likely driven by a combination of both a nudge to shift schools (from a letter mailed home) and the actual policy that allowed students to switch schools

Url: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/177888

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Garud, Keshav

Institution: The University of Michigan

Department: Economics

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Pages: 1-176

Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Health, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity

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