Essays on Health Economics

Abstract

The first two chapters investigates the issues that arose after individuals experienced certain shocks that affected their health. Chapter 1 focuses on the short-run and long-run effect of childhood maltreatment on mental health. Chapter 2 investigates the effect of a new medication, PrEP, on individuals’ risky sexual behaviors and sexually transmitted infections. The last chapter exams the relationship between individuals’ timing pattern of working and their success in the setting of online game streaming. Time Heals All Wound? Childhood Maltreatment and Mental Health Empirical evidence has shown that maltreatment may cause serious damage to the human capital development of children and result in negative outcomes in their adulthood. Mental health may be one of the underlying mechanisms through which maltreatment affects human capital accumulation. Using the data from the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, I examined the relationship between childhood maltreatment and mental health both in the short run and in the long run. The results show the childhood experience of maltreatment imposes negative effect on mental health. The effect is at least significant in the long run, suggesting that the effect is long-lasting and does not necessarily fade away as time passes. Females are on average more vulnerable to maltreatment than males. Experiencing multiple forms of maltreatment would impose a worse effect on mental health compared to single form of maltreatment. PrEP, Risky Sexual Behaviors and STIs Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is a daily medicine for people at high risk of contracting HIV to lower their chance of getting infected. Clinical studies show that PrEP can be highly effective, reducing the risk of contracting HIV by more than 90\%. Despite the great effectiveness of PrEP in preventing HIV infection, there is concern that PrEP may lead some people to more risky behaviors, such as reducing their use of condoms and increasing their number of sexual partners. Using public data from the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, this paper empirically examines such concern. Exploiting the panel nature of the data, we use a difference-in-difference model to study the effect of PrEP on risky sexual behaviors and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Our analysis shows that PrEP makes individuals more likely to engage in unprotected anal sex, have more sexual partners, and more likely to contract syphilis. The Early Bird Gets the Worm: Strategic timing to live-stream on Huya.com Using scraped data from an online video game live streaming platform, I study the streamers' strategic decisions of when to go online and the effects of these timing pattern on their success on the platform. Live streamers as the content creators face different amount of audience during different times of the day as the website traffic fluctuates over the course of 24 hours. They also face different levels of competition as the number of online streamers change in each hour. I use a simple model of streamers' behaviors as benchmark of market equilibrium and study how the real data deviate from the model predictions. The result show live streamers exhibit over competition and decreased gains in rush hour and in contrast they also present under competition and increased gains in the slow hour. Potential rationales are discussed to explain such phenomenon.