Time Preferences and Medication Adherence: Evidence from Pregnant Women in South Africa

Kai Barron, Mette Trier Damgaard, Christina Gravert and Lisa Norrgren

No 9988, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The effectiveness of health recommendations and treatment plans depends on the extent to which individuals follow them. For the individual, medical adherence involves an inter-temporal trade-off between expected future health benefits and immediate effort costs. Therefore examining time preferences may help us to understand why some people fail to follow health recommendations and treatment plans. In this paper, we use a simple, real-effort task implemented via text message to elicit the time preferences of pregnant women in South Africa. We find evidence that high discounters are significantly less likely to report to adhere to the recommendation of taking daily iron supplements daily during pregnancy. There is some weak indication that time inconsistency also negatively affects adherence. Together our results suggest that measuring time preferences could help predict medication adherence and thus be used to improve preventive health care measures.

Keywords: time preferences; medication adherence; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9988.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9988

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().