Shishu Zhang | ||
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Job Market Paper Do Our Children Become Healthier and Wiser? The Effect of Medicaid Coverage on School Absenteeism Presented at Missouri Valley Economics Conf. 2009 Click here for the full paper in PDF [Abstract] After the expansion of Medicaid coverage, children make up nearly half of the Medicaid population. This paper studies the effect of Medicaid on children’s school absenteeism by using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). First, I test the hypothesis that Medicaid enrollment reduces school days missed in a reduced form model using a fixed effects negative binomial model. Second, I estimate a three equation path model to test three hypotheses: (1) Medicaid enrollment leads to more doctor visits. (2) More doctor visits results in better health for children. (3) Better health causes less school absenteeism. Instrumental variable estimation is used to handle the endogeneity between children’s health and doctor visits. Fixed effects estimation reduces the bias attributable to unobserved individual effects that are time-invariant. Finally, propensity score matching and coarsened exact matching reduce bias due to mismatching in treatment model. Combining the estimates from the three equations, I conclude that Medicaid enrollment significantly reduces missed school days.
[1] The Effect of Children's Medicaid Enrollment on School Performance --- A Propensity Score Matching Approach, 2008 Won Second Prize in Graduate Student Paper Competition Presented at Midwest Economics Conf. 2008 [2] Do Our Children Become Healthier? --- A Study of the Effect of Medicaid Expansion on Elementary School Attendance, 2007 Won the Award for Best Graduate Student Paper in Health Economics Presented at Midwest Economics Conf. 2007
[1] A Dynamic Model Approach to Students' Daily Attendance, with Evan Anderson, 2009 [2] Health Conditions and Portofolio Choices of Elders in the United States, 2008 |
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