I am an applied microeconomist studying health economics, development economics, and industrial organization.
My research focuses on the roles of the government and the private sector in health care, health insurance, and health systems broadly.
Working Papers:
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Private Entry into Public Hospital Markets: Evidence from Malaysia
As countries develop, fiscal constraints in the public sector lead to increased demand for private sector services. How should the government make public investments when anticipating private entrants? I study this question in the Malaysian hospital market using a spatial dataset that combines hospital locations, entry timing, and demographics. Instead of crowding-out private entrants, I find that new public hospitals crowd-in private hospitals and private hospitals agglomerate around public hospitals due to shared labor markets and demand-side complementarities. Given these incentives, I build a spatial entry model to quantify the gains from accounting for private entry when allocating public hospitals. Counterfactual simulations show that reallocating public hospitals can improve welfare by changing the incentives of where private hospitals choose to locate. These findings show how public investments can not only crowd-in private investments but can also influence firm locations beyond conventional economic policies such as subsidies or tax incentives.
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Politicians and Bureaucratic Planning: Evidence from Malaysian Hospitals
[ Abstract ] [ Draft ] - Comments welcome!I study how politicians influenced the allocation of public hospitals in Malaysia from 1959 to 2013. Malaysia follows a two-stage planning process of funding allocation, proceeded by hospital construction. I exploit differences between hospital district and electoral seat boundaries to identify the effects of politicians and bureaucrats across these two stages. I find that political distortions are mitigated during the funding allocation stage due to a rule-based bureaucratic procedure in allocating funding. Absent of codified procedures, hospitals favor areas with prominent politicians. These results show how the use of bureaucratic rules in allocating public goods can mitigate political distortions.
Publications:
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Consumer Choice and Public-Private Providers: The Role of Perceived Prices (with Wei Aun Yap and Winnie Yip). Health Economics 2022.
Governments often encourage health service providers to improve quality of care and reduce prices through competition. The efficacy of competition hinges on the assumption that consumers demand high quality care at low prices for any given health condition. In this paper, we examine this assumption by investigating the role of perceived price and quality on consumer choice for four different health conditions across public and private providers. We use a nationally representative survey in Malaysia to elicit respondents' perception on prices and quality, and their preferred choice of provider. We estimate a mixed logit model and show that consumers value different dimensions of quality depending on the health condition. Furthermore, increasing perceived prices for private providers reduces demand for minor, more frequent health conditions such as flu fever or cough, but increases demand for more complex, severe conditions such as coronary artery bypass graft. These findings provide empirical support for price regulation which differentiates the severity of underlying health conditions.