Journal of health economics
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This paper exploits the discontinuity created by the minimum legal drinking age of 21 years to estimate the causal effect of increased alcohol availability on marijuana use. We find that consumption of marijuana decreases sharply at age 21, while consumption of alcohol increases, suggesting that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes. We further find that the substitution effect between alcohol and marijuana is stronger for women than for men. Our results suggest that policies designed to limit alcohol use have the unintended consequence of increasing marijuana use.
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We examine the marginal effects of decentralized public health spending by incorporating estimates of behavioural responses to changes in health spending in benefit incidence analysis. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 207 Indonesian districts over the period from 2001 to 2004. We show that district public health spending is largely driven by central government transfers, with an elasticity of around 0.9. ⋯ We find no evidence that public expenditures crowd out utilization of private services or household health spending. Our analysis suggests that increased public health spending improves targeting to the poor, as behavioural changes in public health care utilization are pro-poor. Nonetheless, most of the benefits of the additional spending accrued to existing users of services, as initial utilization shares outweigh the behavioural responses.
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Financial incentives are increasingly being advocated as an effective means to influence health-related behaviours. There is, however, limited evidence on whether they work in low-income countries, particularly when implemented at scale. This paper explores the impact of a national programme in Nepal that provides cash incentives to women conditional on them giving birth in a health facility. ⋯ Women who had heard of the SDIP before childbirth were 4.2 percentage points (17 percent) more likely to deliver with a skilled attendant. The treatment effect is positively associated with the size of the financial package offered by the programme and the quality of care in facilities. Despite the positive effect on those exposed to the SDIP, low coverage of the programme suggests that few women actually benefited in the first few years.