IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5216.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Disease Complementarities and the Evaluation of Public Health Interventions

Author

Listed:
  • William H. Dow
  • Jessica Holmes
  • Tomas Philipson
  • Xavier Sala-i-Martin

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other causes. This means that a specific public health intervention has benefits other than the direct medical reduction in mortality: it affects the incentives to fight other diseases so the overall reduction in mortality will, in general, be larger than that predicted by the direct medical effects. We discuss evidence of these cross-disease effects by using data on neo-natal tetanus vaccination through the Expanded Programme on Immunization of the World Health Organization.

Suggested Citation

  • William H. Dow & Jessica Holmes & Tomas Philipson & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 1995. "Disease Complementarities and the Evaluation of Public Health Interventions," NBER Working Papers 5216, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5216
    Note: EFG EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5216.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arthur, W B, 1981. "The Economics of Risks to Life," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(1), pages 54-64, March.
    2. Rosen, Sherwin, 1988. "The Value of Changes in Life Expectancy," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 1(3), pages 285-304, September.
    3. Grossman, Michael, 1972. "On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 80(2), pages 223-255, March-Apr.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David M. Cutler & Grant Miller, 2004. "The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The 20th Century United States," NBER Working Papers 10511, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Holmes, Jessica & Philipson, Tomas & Sala-i-Martin, Xavier & Tahvonen, Olli, 1995. "Death, Tetanus and Aerobics: The Evaluation of Disease-Specific Health Interventions," CEPR Discussion Papers 1283, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Charles I. Jones, 2016. "Life and Growth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 124(2), pages 539-578.
    3. Robert E. Hall & Charles I. Jones, 2007. "The Value of Life and the Rise in Health Spending," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(1), pages 39-72.
    4. Tomas Philipson & Gary S. Becker, 1996. "Mortality Contingent Claims, Health Care, and Social Insurance," NBER Working Papers 5760, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Volker Grossmann, 2021. "Medical Innovations and Ageing: A Health Economics Perspective," CESifo Working Paper Series 9387, CESifo.
    6. de Walque, Damien, 2007. "How does the impact of an HIV/AIDS information campaign vary with educational attainment? Evidence from rural Uganda," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 686-714, November.
    7. Ryan Edwards, 2013. "The cost of uncertain life span," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(4), pages 1485-1522, October.
    8. Svetlana Pashchenko & Ponpoje (Poe) Porapakkarm & Mariacristina De Nardi, 2017. "The Lifetime Costs of Bad Health," 2017 Meeting Papers 533, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Kuhn, Michael & Frankovic, Ivan & Wrzaczek, Stefan, 2017. "Medical Progress, Demand for Health Care, and Economic Performance," VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking 168249, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    10. Guang-Zhen Sun & Yew-Kwang Ng, 2008. "Finite Life Expectancy And The Age-Dependent Value Of A Statistical Life," Monash Economics Working Papers 12/08, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    11. Antoine Bommier & Bertrand Villeneuve, 2012. "Risk Aversion and the Value of Risk to Life," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 79(1), pages 77-104, March.
    12. Stefan Felder, 2006. "Lebenserwartung, medizinischer Fortschritt und Gesundheitsausgaben: Theorie und Empirie," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 7(s1), pages 49-73, May.
    13. John Karl Scholz & Ananth Seshadri, 2016. "The Interaction between Consumption and Health in Retirement," Working Papers wp344, University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center.
    14. Kuhn, Michael & Wrzaczek, Stefan & Prskawetz, Alexia & Feichtinger, Gustav, 2011. "Externalities in a life cycle model with endogenous survival," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(4-5), pages 627-641.
    15. Julien Hugonnier & Florian Pelgrin, 2013. "Health and (Other) Asset Holdings," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 80(2), pages 663-710.
    16. Heer, Burkhard & Rohrbacher, Stefan, 2021. "Endogenous longevity and optimal tax progressivity," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    17. Husain, Muhammad Jami, 2009. "Contribution of health to economic development: a survey and overview," Economics Discussion Papers 2009-40, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    18. Ruediger Rackwitz, 2004. "Optimal and Acceptable Technical Facilities Involving Risks," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 24(3), pages 675-695, June.
    19. Daniel Cerqueira & Rodrigo R. Soares, 2016. "The Welfare Cost of Homicides in Brazil: Accounting for Heterogeneity in the Willingness to Pay for Mortality Reductions," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(3), pages 259-276, March.
    20. Johansson, Per-Olov, 2002. "Defining the value of a statistical life: reply," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 177-178, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I0 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5216. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.