JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT This paper uses a direct measure of information to empirically investigate the determinants of consumer health information and the linkage of the information to demand for preventive care. In our analysis, two equations are estimated: (1) health information and (2) demand for preventive care, which includes health information as an endogenous explanatory variable. Overall, the results show that more and better health information increases the probability that the elderly will use preventive care. This result, in combination with the finding that health information is not uniform among the elderly, suggests that poor information can become an access barrier to preventive care. is important to the demand for medical care because it has been shown that poorly informed consumers are more likely to underestimate the marginal product of medical care. And the lower the perceived marginal product of medical care, the less likely it is that the individual will decide to visit the physician (Kenkel 1990). Thus, poor information may become an access barrier to medical care.On the other hand, the decrease in acute illnesses and the proportional increase in chronic diseases has become a common trend in many countries. Most chronic diseases can be avoided if individuals can change their lifestyle. For example, the empirical results of Newhouse and Friedlander (1980) support the view that individual behavior affects health more than do additional medical resources. Also, the consequences of chronic diseases could be reduced by seeking preventive care.1 Preventive care is particularly important for the elderly because the incidence rates of chronic diseases are high for them. Therefore, the question of whether the elderly have sufficient accurate information to know when and where to seek appropriate preventive care has led to widespread concern.The empirical investigation of the role of consumer information in determining the demand for medical care began with Pauly and Satterthwaite (1981). They used only an indirect proxy to measure information, however, and ignored the determinants of information. Kenkel (1990) offered a direct measure of health information, based on responses to survey questions about the meaning of symptoms, to examine the effect of consumers' health information on their decisions to visit physicians and on the number of visits, conditional on any use. Both studies are based on data which focus on the use of curative medical care. By contrast, virtually no empirical study...

The results of this study enable us to understand more thoroughly the characteristics of women who undergo a Pap test and breast examination, as well as the factors that influence them in Taiwan. The findings can help formulate related policies that are directed at removing the barriers to accessing medical care and targeting those at-risk groups. This analysis provides new evidence of the factors affecting the utilization of preventive care among women in a developing country, which are comparable to those of other countries, and may shed further light on the issue of promoting cancer screening and women's health.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of economic fluctuations on health outcome. By using data obtained from eight Asia-Pacific countries over the period 1976 to 2003 and a fixed-effects model to conduct the regression analysis, the results of this study indicate that unemployment rate is negatively and significantly correlated with total mortality and mortality rates from cardiovascular diseases, motor vehicle accidents and infant mortality. These findings are consistent with the view that health may improve during economic downturns. In addition, suicide is found to move countercyclically with economic fluctuations. Socioeconomic factors such as age and gender also play important roles in affecting the mortality rates. The results also show that unemployment has a stronger immediate and contemporaneous, rather than a sustained, effect on mortality rates. Finally, this study concludes that the effects of economic fluctuations on health outcome tend to lead to erroneous conclusions if the fixed-effects problems are neglected. The findings of this study shed some light on the link between economic fluctuations and health outcome and provide further international evidence on this issue.

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