Three Essays in Health Economics

Abstract

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter explores the effects of prenatal nutritional deficiency on depression in adulthood. It is well established that maternal behaviour during pregnancy has a lasting effect on the child for years to come. Studies show that in utero nutritional shocks can have prolonged effects on health and labour market outcomes later in life of the offspring. In this paper I investigate whether such nutritional deficiencies during gestation can have an extended impact on mental health in adulthood. Using the fourth wave of Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), I find that Muslim individuals who were potentially exposed to Ramadan in the first and third trimester have significantly higher scores on the depression scale than those who were not exposed. This effect is particularly significant among Muslim males who were exposed in the first trimester and Muslim females who were exposed in the third trimester. Similar effects of exposure are also found on the probability of being depressed in the Muslim population. The absence of such impact of exposure in the non-Muslim population suggests that nutritional deficiencies during the gestation period can have lasting effects on mental health and may increase the possibility of developing depression later in life. Next, the literature on socioeconomic health inequality uses individuals' socioeconomic rank (p) to develop the concentration index. In the second chapter of the thesis, I construct an alternative framework by directly using individuals' income level (y) to rank them and develop stochastic dominance conditions to investigate whether this method leads to the same conclusion as using the socioeconomic ranks (p). Using World Health Survey data for five South Asian countries, I conclude that using the socioeconomic ranks (p) and income levels (y) to rank individuals lead to different results in dominance tests adjusted for different equivalence scales. Lastly, to address the arbitrariness problem of the health concentration index's value caused by assuming the existence of a ratio-scaled variable, Makdissi and Yazbeck (2014) adopted a counting approach to measure health inequality. In the third chapter of the thesis, I apply this counting approach in a two-fold way. Firstly, I estimate the values of population health status and health inequality in United States using the National Health Interview Survey (2010) data. Then, assuming increased government expenditure on health awareness, I simulate the effects such policy interventions and see what improvements in the public health can be achieved. Also, I propose the count-approach incremental cost effectiveness ratio (C-ICER) which is a simple measure to assess the cost effectiveness of public health awareness campaigns.