Yaohui DONG will defend his thesis in economics on Tuesday, September 11th, 2018 on « Essays in Health Economics ».
3:00pm , Room MQ 212 (Manufacture des Tabacs)
Supervisor: Helmuth CREMER, Professor, Toulouse school of Economics
Co-supervisor : Catarina GOULAO, Professor, Toulouse school of Economics
Memberships are:
- Professor Francesca BARIGOZZI, University of Bologna
- Professor Cheng HUANG, Institut de Technologie SHENZHEN
- Professor Emmanuel THIBAULT, University of Perpignan
- Professeur Jean-Marie LOZACHMEUR, Toulouse School of Economics
- Professeur Helmuth CREMER, Toulouse School of Economics
- Professeure Catarina GOULAO, Toulouse School of Economics
Abstract:
This thesis investigates several topics in health economics, and each of the three chapters is a self-contained paper. It aims to contribute to the design of health care systems and provides suggestions to policy makers.
The first two chapters comes from my job market paper entitled "Reference De- pendent Decisions on Non-communicable Diseases: Prevention, Treatment and Optimal Health Insurance". In Chapter 1, I develop a reference dependent theory that accounts for people’s decisions on their prevention and treatment of non-communicable diseases. Patients are predicted to have the same willingness to pay for the treatment of NCDs, and to go bankrupt if the willingness to pay exceeds their in- come. It imposes more realistic assumptions of health decisions, and the reference dependent theory better fits people’s decision patterns regarding NCDs. It also leads to different policy implications regarding the design of social insurance.
Chapter 2 is the application of the theory in the design of social health insurance. It investigates how individuals with reference dependent preferences respond to various forms of social insurance. It shows that health insurance with copays can either encourage or discourage prevention, even when the efforts are not observable to the insurance provider. Moreover, deductible insurance is found to be financially unfeasible with ex-post moral hazard. The chapter then derives the analytical re- sults of optimal social health insurance with the presence of ex-ante and ex-post moral hazard. The inverse relationship between income and prevention serves as a justification of redistribution.
The third chapter, co-authored with Catarina Goulão, studies the impact of patient mobility on different health care systems that compete using waiting time and price respectively. We use a Hotelling model with two regions with different types of public health care systems to study the impact of patient mobility on their interac- tion, and on the regional welfare. We first characterize the autarky scenarios where patient mobility is no allowed, and shows that price and waiting time have different welfare impacts on regional welfare. We then explore equilibrium price and waiting time if patient mobility is allowed, and compare with the autarky scenario, and discuss the possible impacts on regional welfare.
