IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/uct/uconnp/2016-26.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Health Shocks and the Long-Lasting Change in Health Behaviors: Evidence from Mexico

Author

Listed:
  • Jorge M. Agüero

    (University of Connecticut)

  • Trinidad Beleche

    (RAND Corporation)

Abstract

Worldwide, the leading causes of death could be avoided with health behaviors that are low-cost but also difficult to adopt. We show that exogenous health shocks could facilitate the adoption of these behaviors and provide long-lasting effects on health outcomes. Specifically, we exploit the spatial and temporal variation of the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak in Mexico and show that areas with a higher incidence of H1N1 experienced larger reductions in diarrhea-related cases. These reductions continue even three years after the shock ended. Changes in hand washing behaviors are behind these health improvements. Several robustness checks validate our findings and mechanism.

Suggested Citation

  • Jorge M. Agüero & Trinidad Beleche, 2016. "Health Shocks and the Long-Lasting Change in Health Behaviors: Evidence from Mexico," Working papers 2016-26, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:uct:uconnp:2016-26
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2016-26.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, 2014. "The cost of racial animus on a black candidate: Evidence using Google search data," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 26-40.
    2. D'Amuri, Francesco & Marcucci, Juri, 2009. "‘Google it!’ Forecasting the US unemployment rate with a Google job search index," ISER Working Paper Series 2009-32, Institute for Social and Economic Research.
    3. Meredith, Jennifer & Robinson, Jonathan & Walker, Sarah & Wydick, Bruce, 2013. "Keeping the doctor away: Experimental evidence on investment in preventative health products," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 196-210.
    4. Bennett, Daniel & Chiang, Chun-Fang & Malani, Anup, 2015. "Learning during a crisis: The SARS epidemic in Taiwan," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 1-18.
    5. Galiani, Sebastian & Gertler, Paul & Orsola-Vidal, Alexandra, 2012. "Promoting handwashing behavior in Peru : the effect of large-scale mass-media and community level interventions," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6257, The World Bank.
    6. Nikolaos Askitas & Klaus F. Zimmermann, 2009. "Google Econometrics and Unemployment Forecasting," Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik), Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, vol. 55(2), pages 107-120.
    7. Philipson, Tomas, 2000. "Economic epidemiology and infectious diseases," Handbook of Health Economics, in: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.), Handbook of Health Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 33, pages 1761-1799, Elsevier.
    8. Ippolito, Pauline M & Mathios, Alan D, 1995. "Information and Advertising: The Case of Fat Consumption in the United States," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(2), pages 91-95, May.
    9. Hammer, Jeffrey & Spears, Dean, 2016. "Village sanitation and child health: Effects and external validity in a randomized field experiment in rural India," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 135-148.
    10. Michael Kremer & Jessica Leino & Edward Miguel & Alix Peterson Zwane, 2011. "Spring Cleaning: Rural Water Impacts, Valuation, and Property Rights Institutions," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(1), pages 145-205.
    11. Viscusi, W Kip, 1990. "Do Smokers Underestimate Risks?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(6), pages 1253-1269, December.
    12. Nava Ashraf & James Berry & Jesse M. Shapiro, 2010. "Can Higher Prices Stimulate Product Use? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Zambia," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(5), pages 2383-2413, December.
    13. Margolis, Jesse & Hockenberry, Jason & Grossman, Michael & Chou, Shin-Yi, 2014. "Moral Hazard and Less Invasive Medical Treatment for Coronary Artery Disease: The Case of Cigarette Smoking," IZA Discussion Papers 8492, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Harris, Jeffrey E. & Balsa, Ana Inés & Triunfo, Patricia, 2015. "Tobacco control campaign in Uruguay: Impact on smoking cessation during pregnancy and birth weight," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 186-196.
    15. Cairncross, Sandy & Shordt, Kathleen & Zacharia, Suma & Govindan, Beena Kumari, 2005. "What causes sustainable changes in hygiene behaviour? A cross-sectional study from Kerala, India," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 61(10), pages 2212-2220, November.
    16. Hyunyoung Choi & Hal Varian, 2012. "Predicting the Present with Google Trends," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 88(s1), pages 2-9, June.
    17. Philipson, Tomas & Posner, Richard A, 1994. "Public Spending on AIDS Education: An Economic Analysis," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 37(1), pages 17-38, April.
    18. Pascaline Dupas, 2011. "Health Behavior in Developing Countries," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 3(1), pages 425-449, September.
    19. John Malcolm Dowling & Chin-Fang Yap, 2014. "Communicable Diseases in Developing Countries," Palgrave Macmillan Books, Palgrave Macmillan, number 978-1-137-35478-5, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Oster, Emily, 2018. "Does disease cause vaccination? Disease outbreaks and vaccination response," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 90-101.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Agüero, Jorge M. & Beleche, Trinidad, 2017. "Health shocks and their long-lasting impact on health behaviors: Evidence from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in Mexico," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 40-55.
    2. James Berry & Greg Fischer & Raymond Guiteras, 2020. "Eliciting and Utilizing Willingness to Pay: Evidence from Field Trials in Northern Ghana," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 128(4), pages 1436-1473.
    3. Jorge M. Agüero, 2019. "Information and Behavioral Responses with More than One Agent: The Case of Domestic Violence Awareness Campaigns," Working papers 2019-04, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics.
    4. Yang, Xin & Pan, Bing & Evans, James A. & Lv, Benfu, 2015. "Forecasting Chinese tourist volume with search engine data," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 386-397.
    5. Jacques Bughin, 2015. "Google searches and twitter mood: nowcasting telecom sales performance," Netnomics, Springer, vol. 16(1), pages 87-105, August.
    6. Chien-jung Ting & Yi-Long Hsiao, 2022. "Nowcasting the GDP in Taiwan and the Real-Time Tourism Data," Advances in Management and Applied Economics, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 12(3), pages 1-2.
    7. Nikolaos Askitas & Klaus F. Zimmermann, 2015. "The internet as a data source for advancement in social sciences," International Journal of Manpower, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 36(1), pages 2-12, April.
    8. Jacopo Bonan & Stefano Pareglio & Massimo Tavoni, 2014. "Access to Modern Energy: a Review of Impact Evaluations," Working Papers 2014.96, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    9. Lybbert, Travis J. & Vosti, Stephen A. & Adams, Katherine P. & Guissou, Rosemonde, 2018. "Household demand persistence for child micronutrient supplementation," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 147-164.
    10. Yann Algan & Fabrice Murtin & Elizabeth Beasley & Kazuhito Higa & Claudia Senik, 2019. "Well-being through the lens of the internet," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(1), pages 1-23, January.
    11. Jianchun Fang & Wanshan Wu & Zhou Lu & Eunho Cho, 2019. "Using Baidu Index To Nowcast Mobile Phone Sales In China," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 64(01), pages 83-96, March.
    12. Chien-jung Ting & Yi-Long Hsiao & Rui-jun Su, 2022. "Application of the Real-Time Tourism Data in Nowcasting the Service Consumption in Taiwan," Journal of Applied Finance & Banking, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 12(4), pages 1-4.
    13. Meredith, Jennifer & Robinson, Jonathan & Walker, Sarah & Wydick, Bruce, 2013. "Keeping the doctor away: Experimental evidence on investment in preventative health products," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 196-210.
    14. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/5k53daedc2827oa91tfpuscvbn is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Abu Siddique & Tabassum Rahman & Debayan Pakrashi & Asad Islam & Firoz Ahmed, 2020. "Raising COVID-19 Awareness in Rural Communities: A Randomized Experiment in Bangladesh and India," Munich Papers in Political Economy 09, Munich School of Politics and Public Policy and the School of Management at the Technical University of Munich.
    16. Florian Schaffner, 2015. "Predicting US bank failures with internet search volume data," ECON - Working Papers 214, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
    17. Pascaline Dupas & Edward Miguel, 2016. "Impacts and Determinants of Health Levels in Low-Income Countries," NBER Working Papers 22235, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Rodrigo Mulero & Alfredo Garcia-Hiernaux, 2023. "Forecasting unemployment with Google Trends: age, gender and digital divide," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 65(2), pages 587-605, August.
    19. Gutiérrez, Antonio, 2023. "La brecha de género en el emprendimiento y la cultura emprendedora: Evidencia con Google Trends [Entrepreneurship gender gap and entrepreneurial culture: Evidence from Google Trends]," MPRA Paper 115876, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Park, Sungjun & Kim, Jinsoo, 2018. "The effect of interest in renewable energy on US household electricity consumption: An analysis using Google Trends data," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 1004-1010.
    21. Olivier Gergaud & Victor Ginsburgh, 2016. "Evaluating the Economic Effects of Cultural Events," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2016-24, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    health shocks; health behaviors; hand washing; children; diarrhea;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I15 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uct:uconnp:2016-26. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark McConnel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deuctus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.