Duke 2008 | ASHE | Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare

This session brings together a diverse group of young scholars working on important topics in health economics. The common link among the papers in the session is that each research project advances its respective literature by identifying credibly exogenous variation through the use of a natural experiment associated with a public policy intervention. The first two papers exploit the plausibly exogenous staggered timing of adoption of interventions related to water fluoridation and minimum staffing legislation to identify causal effects on outcomes. The last two papers use regression discontinuity methods applied to public policies pertaining to compulsory schooling laws and minimum drinking age laws to assess causality. In each paper, the authors pay careful attention to the credibility of the quasi-experimental variation. The session will draw individuals interested in each of the substantive topics as well as health economists interested in research design and causal inference.