Brendan Rabideau, PhD Candidate in Health Economics and Policy

Title: Effects of Patient-Side Cost-Sharing on Telemental Health Utilization and Access to Mental Health Services

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an explosion in demand for telemedicine, and with it came myriad new, untested telemedicine policies. The effects of these policies are largely unknown and understanding them will be essential in readjusting the healthcare landscape for the post-pandemic world. I isolate the effect that patient-side cost-sharing has on the utilization of telemental health and overall access to mental health care. Using a difference-in-differences design which exploits the asymmetric exposure to a temporary telemedicine cost-sharing waiver between two groups, I estimate the elasticity of demand for telemental health, determine the extent to which it is being used as a substitute or complement with in-person care, and show the heterogeneous impacts it has on improving access to mental health care for different subpopulations.

Michael Darden, PhD, Associate Professor

Title: Measuring Mental Health

Abstract:  Economists view health as a form of human capital that raises productivity and improves the quality and length of life. Yet empirically, mental health is notoriously difficult to measure; mental health has no natural scale, and proxy measures of mental health are arbitrarily weighted. We demonstrate identification of a measurement system for latent mental health within an otherwise standard dynamic empirical model. We apply the model to the question of how retirement affects mental health, and we jointly estimate parameters that dictate labor.