【AEW Webinar】Online versus In-Person Services: Effects on Patients and Providers

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• 研討會日期 : 2023-11-30
• 時間 : 15:00
• 主講人 : Professor Guy Michaels
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Guy Michaels received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. He is currently an Associate Professor at LSE. His research interests are Labour Economics, Urban Economics, and Development Economics.
• 演講摘要 : Online delivery of one-to-one services offers potential to increase convenience, decrease costs, and reduce inequalities in users’ access. But we have relatively little evidence on how the delivery mode impacts both providers and consumers. This paper focuses on online delivery of healthcare services and specifically – primary care doctor consultations. To study this we use new data from Sweden and effectively random assignment of patients to nurses with different propensities to refer patients to online versus in-person doctor consultations. We find that while online consultations are delivered sooner and are shorter, they yield similar in-meeting outcomes, including rates of diagnosis, prescription, specialist referral, patient satisfaction, and 30-day post-consultation avoidable hospitalizations. Online consultations are, however, followed by more visits to emergency departments and in-person primary care consultations. Nevertheless, patients’ medium-run outcomes do not differ significantly after online consultations. Adding the costs of increased in-person follow ups, online visits offer modest overall cost savings.
• Working Paper Title : When Growth Stumbles, Pollute? Trade War and Environmental Enforcement
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Xinming Du received her PhD from Columbia University in 2023. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests are environmental economics, applied micro, and the digital economy.
• Working Paper Abstract : This paper investigates how political incentives affect the trade-off between short-term economic growth and environmental enforcement. In the context of international trade conflicts, we use the U.S.-China trade war as a natural experiment and find that higher U.S. tariffs worsen air quality in China. The city-level analysis shows that a 1% increase in the tariff burden leads to 0.9% and 0.7% increases in SO2 and PM2.5, respectively. Firm-level emission data generate similar results. Interestingly, the hourly monitor-level air quality data suggests that the pollution increases are concentrated at night. We hypothesize that the surprising findings can be largely attributed to the lenient environmental policies adopted by local governments when faced with the risks of economic downturn. We provide suggestive evidence that cities more exposed to the U.S. tariffs attach less emphasis on environmental regulations in local government reports and charge fewer fines on firms violating environmental regulations. Cities with native and older party secretaries and areas closer to province boundaries experience a less severe increase in pollution during the trade war. Our findings are relevant as China scrambles to maintain growth in the face of economic headwinds.