Private Health Investments under Competing Risks: Evidence from Malaria Control in Senegal

Pauline Rossi and Paola Villar

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This study exploits the introduction of high subsidies for anti-malaria products in Senegal in 2009 to investigate if malaria prevents parents to invest in child health. Building upon the seminal paper of Dow et al. (1999), we develop a simple model of health investments under competing mortality risks, in which people allocate expenses to equalize lifetime across all causes of death. We predict that private health investments to fight malaria as well as other diseases should increase in response to anti-malaria public interventions. To test this prediction, we use original panel data from a Senegalese household survey combined with geographical information on malaria prevalence. Our strategy is to compare the evolution of child health expenditures before and after anti-malaria interventions, between malarious and non-malarious regions of Senegal. We find that health expenditures in malarious regions catch up with non-malarious regions, at the extensive and intensive margins, and both in level and in composition. The same result holds for parental health-seeking behavior in case of other diseases like diarrhea. We provide evidence that these patterns cannot be explained by differential trends in total income or access to healthcare or child morbidity between malarious and non-malarious regions. Our results suggest that behavioral responses to anti-malaria campaigns magnify their impact on all-cause mortality for children.

Keywords: Health expenses; Malaria; Africa; Human capital; Competing risks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hea
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01634658v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01634658v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Private health investments under competing risks: Evidence from malaria control in Senegal (2020)
Working Paper: Private Health Investments under Competing Risks: Evidence from Malaria Control in Senegal (2020)
Working Paper: Private Health Investments under Competing Risks: Evidence from Malaria Control in Senegal (2017)
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:hal:wpaper:halshs-01634658

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().