Essays in health and development economics

Aaron Isaac Baum

The three papers in this dissertation apply quasi-experimental and experimental methods for causal inference to the fields of health and development economics. The first paper exploits a plausibly exogenous reduction in the supply of health care in New York City caused by an historic storm to separately identify the impacts of health care access, weather shocks, and their interaction on chronic conditions. The second paper investigates how formal credit, informal risk sharing, and insurance interact. I exploit a natural experiment wherein tens of thousands of microfinance borrowers across rural Haiti received a quasi-random value of insurance benefit in the aftermath of catastrophic hurricanes. I show that subsequent demand for credit is increasing in the value of insurance, that insurance has decreasing marginal effects on the demand for credit, and that formal insurance increases...