No abstract

We found significantly positive relationships between social capital and willingness to join and willingness to pay for CBHI in Nepal. Policymakers, aiming to achieve UHC, should be advised that bonding and bridging social capital have differing relationships with willingness to cooperate the external funding sources.

To address exposure to secondhand smoke, which is highly prevalent in Korea, local governments have implemented smoking bans at open public places (parks, bus stops, and school zones) since 2011. Exploiting temporal and spatial variation in the implementation dates of these bans, this study estimates their causal effects on individual smoking behavior. The individual-level longitudinal data from the 2009-2017 Korean Labor and Income Panel Study are linked to the smoking ban legislation information from the National Law Information Center. I find robust evidence that outdoor smoking bans increased the probability of making a quit attempt by 16%. This effect appears immediately after a ban goes into effect and lasts for three or more years. People who spend more time outdoors are more likely to change smoking behavior. I also find heterogeneity in effects across the amount of monetary penalty. Whereas the policy change did not affect the prevalence of smoking overall, higher penalties had stronger impacts on reducing the intensity of smoking and increasing the propensity to try to quit. K E Y W O R D Soutdoor smoking ban, secondhand smoke, smoking behavior J E L C L A S S I F I C A T I O NI10; I12; I18

There is a well-established association between income and child health. We examine the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides cash assistance to low-income children with disabilities, to assess how this relationship arises. We use a large database of Medicaid administrative records to estimate the causal effects of SSI receipt on children's health, using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the rule that low-income children born below a birthweight threshold are automatically eligible for SSI. We find that children whose birthweights fall below the threshold are significantly more likely to be awarded SSI. Over the first 8 years of their lives, children with birthweights just below the threshold incur Medicaid expenditures 30% lower than do those born just above the threshold. They are less likely to be admitted to hospital, have shorter hospital stays when admitted, and use fewer specialist services. Eligible children experience reduced rates of diagnosis across a range of conditions, with significantly lower rates of both acute (infection, injury) and chronic (malnutrition, developmental delay) conditions in early life. SSI receipt delays the incidence of new chronic conditions by 1.7 months and reduces the number of new chronic conditions recorded through age 3 by 15%. Past health shocks significantly increase current healthcare utilization, but an interaction term between the SSI eligibility and past health shocks is not statistically significant, a pattern that suggests that increased income derived from SSI reduces the incidence of early health shocks but does not change how families respond to these shocks. Children receiving SSI are more likely to live in higher income neighborhoods mainly because their families are less likely to move out of better neighborhoods. However, we do not find evidence that children's receipt of SSI affects their mother's health or fertility. Reductions in Medicaid spending associated with SSI eligibility offset increased cash transfer payments by a ratio of 3.3:1.