 How effective are public health departments at preventing mortality?Timothy Tyler Brown Economics & Human Biology, 2014, vol. 13, issue C, 34-45 Abstract: This study estimates the causal impact of variation in the expenditures of California county departments of public health on all-cause mortality rates and the associated value of lives saved. Since the activities of county departments of public health are likely to affect mortality rates with a lag, Koyck distributed lag models are estimated using the Lewbel instrumental variables estimator. The findings show that an additional $10 per capita of public health expenditures reduces all-cause mortality by 9.1 deaths per 100,000. At current funding levels, the long-run annual number of lives saved by the presence of county departments of public health in California is estimated to be approximately 27,000 (26,937 lives, 95% confidence interval: [11,963, 41,911]). The annual value of these lives is estimated to be worth $212.8 billion using inflation-adjusted standard U.S. government estimates of the value of a statistical life ($7.9 million). Keywords: Public health expenditures; All-cause mortality; Lewbel instrumental variables; Dynamic panel models; California (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:13:y:2014:i:c:p:34-45 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2013.10.001 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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