Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Alcohol and self-control: a field experiment in India. American Economic Review Forthcoming
Addiction is complex. For many people it is characterised by a need or compulsion to take something, often to prevent withdrawal, often in conflict with a desire to not take it. This conflicts with Gary Becker’s much-maligned rational theory of addiction, which views the addiction as a choice to maximise utility in the long term. Under Becker’s model, one could use market-based mechanisms to end repeated, long-term drug or alcohol use. By making the cost of continuing to use higher then people would choose to stop. This has led to the development of interventions like conditional payment or cost mechanisms: a user would receive a payment on condition of sobriety. Previous studies, however, have found little evidence people would be willing to pay for such sobriety contracts. This article reports a randomised trial among rickshaw drivers in Chennai, India, a group of people with a high prevalence of high alcohol use and dependency. The three trial arms consisted of a control arm who received an unconditional daily payment, a treatment arm who received a small payment plus extra if they passed a breathalyser test, and a third arm who had the choice between either of the two payment mechanisms. Two findings are of much interest. First, the incentive payments significantly increased daytime sobriety, and second, over half the participants preferred the conditional sobriety payments over the unconditional payments when they were weakly dominated, and a third still preferred them even when the unconditional payments were higher than the maximum possible conditional payment. This conflicts with a market-based conception of addiction and its treatment. Indeed, the nature of addiction means it can override all intrinsic motivation to stop, or do anything else frankly. So it makes sense that individuals are willing to pay for extrinsic motivation, which in this case did make a difference.
Heterogeneity in long term health outcomes of migrants within Italy. Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published 2nd November 2018
We’ve discussed neighbourhood effects a number of times on this blog (here and here, for example). In the absence of a randomised allocation to different neighbourhoods or areas, it is very difficult to discern why people living there or who have moved there might be better or worse off than elsewhere. This article is another neighbourhood effects analysis, this time framed through the lens of immigration. It looks at those who migrated within Italy in the 1970s during a period of large northward population movements. The authors, in essence, identify the average health and mental health of people who moved to different regions conditional on duration spent in origin destinations and a range of other factors. The analysis is conceptually similar to that of two papers we discussed at length on internal migration in the US and labour market outcomes in that it accounts for the duration of ‘exposure’ to poorer areas and differences between destinations. In the case of the labour market outcomes papers, the analysis couldn’t really differentiate between a causal effect of a neighbourhood increasing human capital, differences in labour market conditions, and unobserved heterogeneity between migrating people and families. Now this article examining Italian migration looks at health outcomes, such as the SF-12, which limit the explanations since one cannot ‘earn’ more health by moving elsewhere. Nevertheless, the labour market can still impact upon health strongly.
The authors carefully discuss the difficulties in identifying causal effects here. A number of model extensions are also estimated to try to deal with some issues discussed. This includes a type of propensity score weighting approach, although I would emphasize that this categorically does not deal with issues of unobserved heterogeneity. A finite mixture model is also estimated. Generally a well-thought-through analysis. However, there is a reliance on statistical significance here. I know I do bang on about statistical significance a lot, but it is widely used inappropriately. A rule of thumb I’ve adopted for reviewing papers for journals is that if the conclusions would change if you changed the statistical significance threshold then there’s probably an issue. This article would fail that test. They use a threshold of p<0.10 which seems inappropriate for an analysis with a sample size in the tens of thousands and they build a concluding narrative around what is and isn’t statistically significant. This is not to detract from the analysis, merely its interpretation. In future, this could be helped by banning asterisks in tables, like the AER has done, or better yet developing submission guidelines around its use.
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