Price elasticities of demand for curative health care with control for sample selectivity on endogenous illness: an analysis for Sri Lanka.
Estimation of demand for health care with samples of only the ill may bias estimates. Additionally, the lack of exogenous information, especially distance, about the alternative care providers causes omitted variable problems. This paper alleviates both problems through geographic mapping of facility information to individuals, combined with joint estimation of illness (health production) and health care demand. The joint estimation full sample demand results are compared to those from one equation estimation for only the ill sample. The results indicate that the selectivity problem is significant, but that for this sample the magnitude of the bias on the price coefficient is small.
Akin
J S
JS
Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27516-3997, USA.
Guilkey
D K
DK
Hutchinson
P L
PL
McIntosh
M T
MT
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003906:Developing Countries; D005260:Female; D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000191:economics*; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D008515:Medicine, Ayurvedic; D008875:Middle Aged; D017059:Models, Econometric; D009017:Morbidity; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011203:Poverty; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D015983:Selection Bias; D013188:Sri Lanka / Q000453:epidemiology