Three Essays on Health Econometrics

This dissertation incorporates several estimation procedures and modeling techniques to investigate important issues in health economics. All of the essays are tied to the application of econometrics in health related topics, but the techniques used in this research can be applied to many issues in agricultural, environmental and development economics. The first essay, A Multilevel Approach to Model Obesity and Overweight in the United States , presents a multilevel multinomial econometric approach to model the categories of body mass index as functions of both lifestyle components and the external environment. Among state level variables, higher per-capita sales of restaurants and a higher Gini coefficient are associated with a higher likelihood of being classified as obese or overweight. A higher state unemployment rate is associated with a higher prevalence of being obese or overweight among women. At the individual level, a gain in income has gender-specific effects; it increases the likelihood of women being healthier and men being overweight. More education, regular exercise and sufficient consumption of fruits and vegetables are beneficial to curb obesity. The second essay, Job Loss, Retirement and the Mental Health of Older Americans , examines the effects of involuntary job loss and retirement on the mental health of older Americans. Potential endogeneity may arise due to reverse causality or latent individual effects or both. Using several econometric techniques, consistent and efficient estimates of the explanatory variables are obtained, and it is shown that involuntary job loss impacts mental health negatively, whereas retirement has a positive effect on psychological well-being. Furthermore, upon exploring the role of re-employment on the mental health status of individuals who have retired or suffered involuntary job loss, it is found that reemployment improves the mental health status of both retirees and involuntary job loss sufferers. Perhaps most importantly, the decline in mental health status due to involuntary job loss is fully reversed for those individuals who subsequently reenter the job market. The third essay, Risk Tolerance and its Relation to Important Life Events , studies panel data on three birth-year cohorts to understand the changes in risk tolerance across different age groups. A well-established maximum likelihood estimation procedure is followed to obtain a parametric distribution of the logarithm of relative risk tolerance that is potentially subject to noise, and to assess how this distribution shifts with time. Interval regressions on the first differences in risk tolerance over time capture the reasons for changes in the risk tolerance of each cohort. The main differences in the results as compared to previous studies are that risk tolerance does decrease with age, but there is much more within-subject heterogeneity among younger individuals, and that income lowers risk tolerance among younger Americans, whereas wealth increases risk tolerance among older Americans. The risk tolerance of the oldest cohort is negatively affected by late-life marriage and widowhood, whereas risk tolerance increases with greater wealth, and somewhat due to retirement. An increase in family size through marriage and more children lowers the risk tolerance of the youngest cohort, whereas unemployment has a positive association with tolerance.

• http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/304831332?accountid=14244
• http://vb3lk7eb4t.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx;_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8𝔯_id=info:sid/ProQuest+Dissertations+%26+Theses+Full+Text&rft;_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft.genre;=dissertations+%26+theses&rft.jtitle;=&rft.atitle;=&rft.au;=Mandal%2C+Bidisha&rft.aulast;=Mandal&rft.aufirst;=Bidisha&rft.date;=2007-01-01&rft.volume;=&rft.issue;=&rft.spage;=&rft.isbn;=&rft.btitle;=&rft.title;=Three+essays+on+health+econometrics&rft.issn;=