Price elasticities of demand for curative health care with control for sample selectivity on endogenous illness: an analysis for Sri Lanka

Estimation of demand for health care with samples of only the ill may bias estimates. Additionally, the lack of exogenous information, especially distance, about the alternative care providers causes omitted variable problems. This paper alleviates both problems through geographic mapping of facilit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Health economics 1998-09, Vol.7 (6), p.509-531
Main Authors: Akin, John S., Guilkey, David K., Hutchinson, Paul L., McIntosh, Michael T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Child
Child, Preschool
Developing Countries
Endogenous
endogenous health state
Factors
Female
Health care
health care demand
Health Care Surveys
health production
Health Services Needs and Demand - economics
Health Status
Humans
Infant
Infant, Newborn
Male
Medicine, Ayurvedic
Middle Aged
Models, Econometric
Morbidity
Patient Acceptance of Health Care - psychology
Patient Acceptance of Health Care - statistics & numerical data
Poverty
Price elasticities
Reproducibility of Results
Residence Characteristics
sample selection bias
Selection Bias
Sickness
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka - epidemiology
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Estimation of demand for health care with samples of only the ill may bias estimates. Additionally, the lack of exogenous information, especially distance, about the alternative care providers causes omitted variable problems. This paper alleviates both problems through geographic mapping of facility information to individuals, combined with joint estimation of illness (health production) and health care demand. The joint estimation full sample demand results are compared to those from one equation estimation for only the ill sample. The results indicate that the selectivity problem is significant, but that for this sample the magnitude of the bias on the price coefficient is small. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ISSN:1057-9230
1099-1050
DOI:10.1002/(SICI)1099-1050(199809)7:6<509::AID-HEC366>3.0.CO;2-S