Preventing the White Death: Tuberculosis Dispensaries

Peter Juul Egedesø, Casper Hansen and Peter Jensen

The Economic Journal, 2020, vol. 130, issue 629, 1288-1316

Abstract: Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of death worldwide and while treatable by antibiotics since the 1940s, drug resistant strains have emerged. This article estimates the effects of the establishment of a pre-antibiotic public health institution, known as a TB dispensary, designed to prevent the spread of the disease. Our annual difference-in-differences estimation reveals that the rollout of the dispensaries across Danish cities led to a 19% decline in the TB mortality rate, but no significant impacts on other diseases when performing placebo regressions. We next take advantage of the dispensaries explicit targeting on TB to setup a triple-differences model which exploits other diseases as controls and obtain a similar magnitude of the effect. As for the mechanism, the evidence highlights the dispensaries’ preventive actions, such as information provision. At an estimated cost as low as 68 dollars per saved life-year, this particular public-health institution was extraordinarily cost effective. Overall, our evidence suggests a policy for developing countries to combat drug resistant TB.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueaa014 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Preventing the White Death: Tuberculosis Dispensaries (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:oup:econjl:v:130:y:2020:i:629:p:1288-1316.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().