Working Paper: NBER ID: w9827
Authors: William H. Dow; Kristine A. Gonzalez; Luis Roserobixby
Abstract: One goal of government health insurance programs is to improve health, yet little is known empirically about how important such government interventions can be in explaining health transitions. We analyze the child mortality effects of a major health insurance expansion in Costa Rica. In contrast to previous work in this area that has used aggregated ecological designs, we exploit census data to estimate individual-level models. Theoretical and empirical econometric results indicate that aggregation can introduce substantial upward biases in the insurance effects. Overall we find a statistically significant but quite small effect of health insurance on child mortality in Costa Rica.
Keywords: health insurance; child mortality; Costa Rica; aggregated data; individual-level models
JEL Codes: I1; J1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| health insurance (I13) | child mortality (J13) |
| health insurance (I13) | demand for medical care (I11) |
| aggregation (C43) | upward biases in estimating insurance effects (G52) |
| individual-level models (C20) | more accurate estimation of insurance effects (G52) |