Health Economics: Guatemala Paper of the Day

Isabella Gaitan and I wrote the paper. The title is "Availability of Consumer Prices from Hospitals for a Common Cesarean Procedure in Guatemala."

We investigate the availability of price information for a common surgical procedure, a C-section, in the context of Guatemala. We phoned 98 hospitals and found that, for the most part, hospitals are willing to give an approximate price. The range of prices is Q. 3,000 - Q. 13,000 in Guatemala City, and Q. 2,300 - Q. 9,000 in the departments of the country. It is more difficult however to get more detailed information of prices, such as the price of different components of the procedure. There is room for a consumer to increase her welfare by “shopping around.” The industry is an example of “monopolistic competition.”

You can see the paper here. It also reflects my adventures with LaTex, which is awesome! One of the great things I started to learn in Senegal. 

Economical Writing (or, “think Hemingway”)

This is my new paper co-authored with Julio Cole.

The motivation for this paper is an argument proposed by Salant (1969), who claimed that on many occasions he found the writing of his colleagues “nearly incomprehensible.” Too often, he said, it is difficult to understand the main message that an economist is trying to communicate. He then argued that a “simple way of avoiding clumsiness is to prefer the short word to the long one and to avoid the unfamiliar word if a familiar one can be found that is equally correct, specific, and concrete” (p. 556). We call this “the Salant hypothesis,” and use ANOVA to test this hypothesis by comparing the average length of words used by Nobel laureates in their acceptance speeches. We find that Literature laureates do indeed tend to use shorter words than laureates in other disciplines, and the difference is statistically significant. These results confirm Salant’s idea that words are a scarce resource and should be used efficiently. This includes using short words instead of long ones whenever possible. In short, good writing is also “economical writing.” 

See the draft here.