Essays on public economics
| dc.contributor.advisor | Murphy, Richard J., Ph. D. | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Manuela Angelucci | |
| dc.creator | Choi, Gue Sung | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-07-16T02:10:07Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-07-16T02:10:07Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2024-05 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-05 | |
| dc.date.submitted | May 2024 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2024-07-16T02:10:07Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | Every public policy has a clear goal and good intentions. However, it rarely works out perfectly as originally designed, leading to unintended consequences due to changes in the incentives of various stakeholders. The three chapters of my dissertation discuss the impacts in different fields of education and healthcare. Chapter 1 examines how schools respond to accountability pressures for students with disabilities and how such strategic responses affect students’ long-term outcomes. Using administrative data that link the educational and labor market outcomes of all students in Texas public schools between 1994 and 2019 with a differencein- differences framework, I find that in response to the mandate of incorporating students in special education into accountability measures, schools resorted to granting more test exemptions to these students to protect their ratings. These exemptions were focused on students with lower past test scores. Furthermore, such exclusion led to adverse long-term outcomes such as fewer high school graduations and employment in adulthood. These results indicate that incomplete incentive designs could lead to unintended school behaviors and negatively impact students who were intended to be helped. Chapter 2 studies how the expansion in public health insurance eligibility affects local Over-The-Counter (OTC) pain medication sales by leveraging the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion in 2014 with a rich retail scanner dataset. OTC medications are pharmaceuticals that consumers can access without prescriptions from healthcare providers. Although they serve as a major input for self-treatment by disadvantaged patients, little is known about interactions between insurance coverage and OTC drug use. A difference-in-differences framework interacted with a treatment dosage measure showed that 1 percent point increase in share of uninsured population eligible to expanded Medicaids leads to 0.4 percent reduction in sales of OTC oral pain medications. This result, combined with previous literature, suggests that new health insurance benefits could have induced patients to substitute to more professional healthcare from self-medication with OTC drugs. Chapter 3 explores how mandated PDMPs (MA-PDMPs) in response to the opioid crisis have affected utilization of other pain management options such as nonopioid pain reliever prescriptions and Over-The-Counter (OTC) pain medication purchases. Despite guidelines from CDC and state governments that recommend prescribers to give non-opioid prescriptions after opioid tapering, I find no evidence of change in prescriptions of those substances. Instead, patients seem to have substituted toward OTC pain medications, showing significant increase in sales, especially of drugs marketed for patients with chronic pain. | |
| dc.description.department | Economics | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | ||
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/2152/126044 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/52589 | |
| dc.subject | Education economics | |
| dc.subject | Health economics | |
| dc.subject | Public economics | |
| dc.title | Essays on public economics | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | text | |
| thesis.degree.college | University of Texas at Austin | |
| thesis.degree.department | Economics | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Economics | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | The University of Texas at Austin | |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy |
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