infonet-economy

This dissertation focuses on the measurement of regional home care policy and its effects on health care utilization. It brings three main contributions. First, it provides causal evidence on the effects of home care policy generosity on hospitalizations, doctor visits, and nursing home use. Variations in generosity across the Swiss cantons and over time are used to identify the effects of canton home care policy. The endogeneity of that policy is addressed by using instrumental variables. Second, comprehensive measures of regional home care policy are developed. Two dimensions of generosity are measured as latent variables using factor analysis: the Participation and Intensity dimensions (i.e. how many persons have access to home care services and how much care is provided to home care users). Third, it proposes a bias correction to the OLS estimator for linear regression with factor scores (i.e. estimated values of latent variables such as home care policy).