Essays on Health Economics

• Grant number: 17/22023-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: January 01, 2018
• End date: November 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics
• Principal Investigator: Sergio Pinheiro Firpo
• Grantee: Carolina Ribeiro Veronesi Marinho
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa (Insper). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the last decades, many economies, including the Brazilian one, faced a growth of health spending as a relation to GDP. While increasing spending has brought many benefits, financing these expenditures creates concerns and fiscal consequences for both public and private sectors. In many economies, the public sector dominates health-spending financing. However, even in these economies, the private sector exhibits important participation. In Brazil, despite the existence and advances in the last decades of the Unified Health System (SUS), the private sector accounts for 54% of health spending and 24.5% of the Brazilian population has some private health plan. Moreover, employers predominantly provide private health insurance. The project proposes an empirical research in the field of Health Economics and will be divided in two sections. In the first one, the main purpose is to evaluate the causality between the quality of health services offered by the public sector and the private sector coverage. In the second part, the research project proposes to measure how health plans offered by employers and the quality of the public health service offered through SUS affect the employment and mobility decisions of the employees. The methodology involves quantitative methods, requiring the collection of microdata and municipalities information for the construction of a historical panel dataset, using public and supplementary health sources. The results will be measured and analyzed using econometric tools estimating causal effects and testing specific hypotheses about the quality of the health service offered by the public sector and the quality of the health plans in the decisions of the individuals. (AU)