| dc.description.abstract | Chapter 1 of this dissertation is titled “Social Security Eligibility and Healthcare Utilization: Evidence from Administrative Data”. I estimate the impact of Social Security receipt and retirement on healthcare utilization by exploiting the discontinuous increase in claiming and labor market exit at the Early Eligibility Age of 62. Using administrative data on several types of healthcare encounters from New York and California, I find a discontinuous increase in emergency department (ED) visits that do not result in hospitalization by 1-2% at this age.
Chapter 2 is titled “How Access to Addictive Drugs Affects the Supply of Substance Abuse Treatment: Evidence from Medicare Part D”. This paper documents that substance abuse treatment (SAT) providers and services respond to increases in population-level opioid addiction. I do this by exploiting the implementation of Medicare Part D as an exogenous increase in the availability of prescription opioids. Starting in 2006, states with higher shares of the population eligible for Medicare Part D experienced increases in residential and hospital inpatient SAT facilities, beds dedicated to SAT, and SAT facilities offering medication-assisted treatment, relative to states with lower shares. These results suggest that the supply of SAT in the United States is capable of responding significantly to changes in demand.
Chapter 3 is titled “A fine predicament: Conditioning, compliance and consequences in a labeled cash transfer program” and is authored jointly with Carolyn J. Heinrich. We study the unintended consequences of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), in which conditions are monitored and enforced, versus labeled cash transfers (LCTs), in which conditions are not monitored or enforced. Households in the Kenya Cash Transfer Programme for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CT-OVC) were randomized to received either a CCT or LCT and outcomes were evaluated after two years of transfer receipt. We find that CCT and LCT households display similar conditioned-upon outcomes at endline, but the poorest CCT households at baseline reported lower non-food consumption at endline than the poorest LCT households. This suggests that, in comparison to LCTs, CCTs may produce unintended, regressive policy effects for the most vulnerable participants. | |
