Improving the Availability of Unrelated Stem Cell Donors: Evidence from a Major Donor Registry

Michael Haylock, Patrick Kampkötter, Mario Macis, Jürgen Sauter, Susanne Seitz, Robert Slonim, Daniel Wiesen and Alexander H. Schmidt

No 29857, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The unavailability of potential stem cell donors poses a critical challenge for donor registries worldwide. This study investigates the impact of initiatives of a stem cell donor registry to enhance donors' availability for confirmatory typing. Initiatives ask donors to provide a sample for genetic analysis and/or information on their temporal unavailability. We analyzed 91,479 confirmatory typing requests from DKMS Germany, a large stem cell donor registry, exploiting a quasi-random initiative assignment based on observable characteristics. We find that, first, invitation to the initiatives increases donors' availability. Intention-to-treat estimates yield effects ranging from 2.5 to 3.2 percentage points, and local average treatment effects estimates range from 3.8 to 8.2 percentage points (baseline: 77.1%). Second, the difference in availability between participants and non-participants is over 10 percentage points. The initiatives yield a direct positive effect on donor availability and a selection effect through which participation signals a higher commitment.

JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban
Note: EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29857.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Improving the Availability of Unrelated Stem Cell Donors: Evidence from a Major Donor Registry (2022)
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:nbr:nberwo:29857

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29857

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().