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Essays on Policy Impact Evaluation and Design: Evidence from Structural Experiments in Health and Development
Essays on Policy Impact Evaluation and Design: Evidence from Structural Experiments in Health and Development
상세정보
- 자료유형
- 학위논문 서양
- 최종처리일시
- 20260202103821
- ISBN
- 9798288863219
- DDC
- 614
- 저자명
- Paramo, Carlos.
- 서명/저자
- Essays on Policy Impact Evaluation and Design: Evidence from Structural Experiments in Health and Development
- 발행사항
- [Sl] : University of California, Berkeley, 2025
- 발행사항
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025
- 형태사항
- 238 p
- 주기사항
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: B.
- 주기사항
- Advisor: Handel, Benjamin.
- 학위논문주기
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2025.
- 초록/해제
- 요약This dissertation examines how to better target incentives and aid in developing countries by combining field experiments with structural modeling. I focus on policies related to healthcare and poverty alleviation in Kenya, highlighting key trade-offs in their design. In healthcare, a central policy question is whether incentives should target patients or providers to effectively influence medical decision-making. Additionally, a policy maker designing incentive structures must navigate trade-offs that arise under health state uncertainty, where balancing access to care and minimizing unnecessary treatments is key. For anti-poverty program design, a key trade-off is whether to target incentives to those who are most deprived, or those who have the highest potential impact. By combining field experiments with structural approaches, I evaluate the welfare implications of alternative policy designs and provide evidence to inform more effective targeting strategies.In the first chapter, I study the trade-off between targeting incentives to patients or providers in the adoption of a new health technology. The choice to adopt an effective healthcare product is often a joint decision between the patient and their medical professional. Many governments and payers use patient subsidies and provider incentives to increase the adoption of new health technologies. Using data from a randomized field experiment in Kenya, I estimate a structural model of patient demand and provider advice for a new contraceptive method. I then use the model to study the welfare effects to the patient from the introduction of demand and supply side incentives to adopt the new technology. This approach allows the study of channels that promote diffusion, including the roles of provider advice, financial incentives and altruism, as well as patient preferences. Taken together, the results suggest that changes in provider advice due to their altruism and financial incentives are key to increasing adoption of the new technology and making incentive programs effective, regardless of whether the incentive targets the patient or the provider. In fact, changes in provider advice account for 79% of the welfare benefits of a policy that reduces the price to the patient. To be effective, incentive policies need to account for the central role that the provider takes in medical decision-making.In the second chapter, joint with Maria Dieci, Paul Gertler, and Jonathan Kolstad, we study the welfare effects and optimal design of diagnosis-contingent contracts that aim to improve malaria care. These contracts incentivize the use of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) to determine malaria status before making a treatment decision. A key concern in our context is over-treatment: as many as 66-90% of patients who purchase anti-malarials are, in fact, malaria-negative. The contracts vary along two dimensions: (1) whether they target patient or provider incentives, and (2) whether they offer direct incentives to test or incentives to treat conditional on a positive test result (i.e., diagnosis-contingent incentives). Using data from a cluster-randomized field experiment with 140 pharmacies in malaria-endemic regions of Kenya, we find that the contracts significantly increased RDT uptake. Across all arms, the incentives led to a 25 percentage point increase in RDT use and a 14 percentage point decline in antimalarial (ACT) purchases. Using a model of patient choice, we estimate that diagnosis-contingent contracts increase social welfare substantially relative to program costs, with a rate of return of up to 40% on social welfare growth across the RCT contracts. The primary welfare gain comes from reducing unnecessary ACT use among patients who test negative and therefore do not require treatment. Counterfactual analysis allows us to compare alternative contract designs and identify which margins maximize social welfare. We find that patient subsidies for treatment, contingent on a positive test result, are by far the most cost-effective (with up to a 150% rate of return). This is because patients substantially overestimate their likelihood of having malaria and thus respond strongly to these conditional incentives, even though the expected cost to the policy maker is low due to the low malaria positivity rate in our setting.In the third chapter, joint with Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus, and Michael Walker, we examine the potential tradeoff between targeting the most deprived and targeting those most impacted by anti-poverty programs. We work in the context of an NGO cash transfer program in Kenya, employing recent advances in machine learning methods and dynamic outcome data to learn proxy means tests that jointly target both objectives. Through our conceptual framework, we employ a variety of social welfare functional assumptions about the redistributive preferences of the social planner to identify rules that maximize social welfare. Targeting solely on the basis of deprivation is not attractive in this setting under standard social welfare criteria unless the planner's preferences are extremely redistributive. This finding contrasts with the standard approach in the literature of targeting solely based on deprivation. Our analysis highlights that the advent of econometric methods better suited to study heterogeneity in treatment effects adds to the policy maker's toolkit to better target programs to recipients.
- 일반주제명
- Public health
- 키워드
- Cash transfers
- 키워드
- Health
- 키워드
- Incentives
- 기타저자
- University of California, Berkeley Economics
- 기본자료저록
- Dissertations Abstracts International. 87-01B.
- 전자적 위치 및 접속
- 로그인 후 원문을 볼 수 있습니다.
MARC
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■040 ▼aMiAaPQ▼cMiAaPQ
■0820 ▼a614
■1001 ▼aParamo, Carlos.
■24510▼aEssays on Policy Impact Evaluation and Design: Evidence from Structural Experiments in Health and Development
■260 ▼a[Sl]▼bUniversity of California, Berkeley▼c2025
■260 1▼aAnn Arbor▼bProQuest Dissertations & Theses▼c2025
■300 ▼a238 p
■500 ▼aSource: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: B.
■500 ▼aAdvisor: Handel, Benjamin.
■5021 ▼aThesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2025.
■520 ▼aThis dissertation examines how to better target incentives and aid in developing countries by combining field experiments with structural modeling. I focus on policies related to healthcare and poverty alleviation in Kenya, highlighting key trade-offs in their design. In healthcare, a central policy question is whether incentives should target patients or providers to effectively influence medical decision-making. Additionally, a policy maker designing incentive structures must navigate trade-offs that arise under health state uncertainty, where balancing access to care and minimizing unnecessary treatments is key. For anti-poverty program design, a key trade-off is whether to target incentives to those who are most deprived, or those who have the highest potential impact. By combining field experiments with structural approaches, I evaluate the welfare implications of alternative policy designs and provide evidence to inform more effective targeting strategies.In the first chapter, I study the trade-off between targeting incentives to patients or providers in the adoption of a new health technology. The choice to adopt an effective healthcare product is often a joint decision between the patient and their medical professional. Many governments and payers use patient subsidies and provider incentives to increase the adoption of new health technologies. Using data from a randomized field experiment in Kenya, I estimate a structural model of patient demand and provider advice for a new contraceptive method. I then use the model to study the welfare effects to the patient from the introduction of demand and supply side incentives to adopt the new technology. This approach allows the study of channels that promote diffusion, including the roles of provider advice, financial incentives and altruism, as well as patient preferences. Taken together, the results suggest that changes in provider advice due to their altruism and financial incentives are key to increasing adoption of the new technology and making incentive programs effective, regardless of whether the incentive targets the patient or the provider. In fact, changes in provider advice account for 79% of the welfare benefits of a policy that reduces the price to the patient. To be effective, incentive policies need to account for the central role that the provider takes in medical decision-making.In the second chapter, joint with Maria Dieci, Paul Gertler, and Jonathan Kolstad, we study the welfare effects and optimal design of diagnosis-contingent contracts that aim to improve malaria care. These contracts incentivize the use of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) to determine malaria status before making a treatment decision. A key concern in our context is over-treatment: as many as 66-90% of patients who purchase anti-malarials are, in fact, malaria-negative. The contracts vary along two dimensions: (1) whether they target patient or provider incentives, and (2) whether they offer direct incentives to test or incentives to treat conditional on a positive test result (i.e., diagnosis-contingent incentives). Using data from a cluster-randomized field experiment with 140 pharmacies in malaria-endemic regions of Kenya, we find that the contracts significantly increased RDT uptake. Across all arms, the incentives led to a 25 percentage point increase in RDT use and a 14 percentage point decline in antimalarial (ACT) purchases. Using a model of patient choice, we estimate that diagnosis-contingent contracts increase social welfare substantially relative to program costs, with a rate of return of up to 40% on social welfare growth across the RCT contracts. The primary welfare gain comes from reducing unnecessary ACT use among patients who test negative and therefore do not require treatment. Counterfactual analysis allows us to compare alternative contract designs and identify which margins maximize social welfare. We find that patient subsidies for treatment, contingent on a positive test result, are by far the most cost-effective (with up to a 150% rate of return). This is because patients substantially overestimate their likelihood of having malaria and thus respond strongly to these conditional incentives, even though the expected cost to the policy maker is low due to the low malaria positivity rate in our setting.In the third chapter, joint with Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus, and Michael Walker, we examine the potential tradeoff between targeting the most deprived and targeting those most impacted by anti-poverty programs. We work in the context of an NGO cash transfer program in Kenya, employing recent advances in machine learning methods and dynamic outcome data to learn proxy means tests that jointly target both objectives. Through our conceptual framework, we employ a variety of social welfare functional assumptions about the redistributive preferences of the social planner to identify rules that maximize social welfare. Targeting solely on the basis of deprivation is not attractive in this setting under standard social welfare criteria unless the planner's preferences are extremely redistributive. This finding contrasts with the standard approach in the literature of targeting solely based on deprivation. Our analysis highlights that the advent of econometric methods better suited to study heterogeneity in treatment effects adds to the policy maker's toolkit to better target programs to recipients.
■590 ▼aSchool code: 0028.
■650 4▼aPublic health
■653 ▼aCash transfers
■653 ▼aHealth
■653 ▼aIncentives
■653 ▼aProvider behavior
■653 ▼aStructural experiments
■690 ▼a0501
■690 ▼a0769
■690 ▼a0573
■71020▼aUniversity of California, Berkeley▼bEconomics.
■7730 ▼tDissertations Abstracts International▼g87-01B.
■790 ▼a0028
■791 ▼aPh.D.
■792 ▼a2025
■793 ▼aEnglish
■85640▼uhttp://www.riss.kr/pdu/ddodLink.do?id=T17358253▼nKERIS▼z이 자료의 원문은 한국교육학술정보원에서 제공합니다.


