Abstracts

Essays on Health, Entrepreneurship, and the Labor Market

by Lulu Liu




Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Department:
Year: 2017
Posted: 02/01/2018
Record ID: 2216109
Full text PDF: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/31092/1/Dissertation_LuluLiu.pdf;http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/31092/


Abstract

My dissertation is at the intersection of health economics, development economics, and labor economics, with an emphasis on the labor market impact of health interventions and healthcare policies. The first chapter explores the effect of hypertension control on annual income using data from a randomized controlled trial conducted in rural China. Utilizing the exposure to the interventions as an instrumental variable for blood pressure levels, we found that a one standard deviation decrease in systolic blood pressure can significantly increase annual income by 4.8%. The second chapter investigates the impact of health insurance on entrepreneurs and estimates the alleviation of job lock following a 2009 nationwide healthcare reform the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI) program. Using 2000-2011 data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score weighting, we find that URBMI increases self-employment rate by 5.4% for the overall population.The third chapter analyzes the effect of a major policy change in China the 2007 Property Rights Law that improved the access to credit. I found evidence that the 2007 Property Rights Law promotes entrepreneurship as measured by the number of owner-mangers in the economy, but has little impact on necessity entrepreneurs.