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

Health promotion encompasses a wide range of activities to promote healthy behaviors and to prevent disease, injury, and disability. Health promotion raises important economic and policy issues. Although consumers value health either directly or indirectly, they also value other goods and face real budget constraints. By paying close attention to incentives and constraints, economics can help explain the tradeoffs consumers make between health and other goods. Economics also provides a useful framework for evaluating health promotion policies.

This session will focus on three important issues in health promotion economics. The first presentation examines the relationship between minimum wage laws and body weight. Minimum wage laws may affect the cost of food purchased in restaurants, thereby impacting food consumption. The presentation estimates the relationship between minimum wages and bodyweight using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). The second presentation examines whether workplace health promotion programs increase utilization of recommended screening tests. The potential benefits of workplace health promotion programs are being increasingly touted, but there is relatively little information on the programs' actual effectiveness in providing screening and prevention. The presentation estimates the effect of workplace programs on blood pressure, cholesterol, and cancer screening. The third presentation focuses on a potential cause of the growing obesity epidemic in the U.S. by examining whether adolescents' weights are affected by the weights of their friends. If important, peer effects could have implications for anti-obesity policies, since the impact of these policies could be magnified by social multipliers. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Youth (Add Health) to test for peer effects.