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- All Subjects: Health Insurance
- All Subjects: Music
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Description
Existing research into the health benefits of insurance fall into two major categories \u2014 observational and experimental. Observational studies have centered on data sets from before 2000 and focus on the mortality differences between the privately insured and the uninsured. Experimental studies began with Massachusetts' 2006 health reform and continued after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. These studies measure the effects of public insurance among the coverage expansion populations. These two bodies of literature come to ambiguous and contradictory conclusions to the mortality effects and health value of insurance. This study extends the observational methodologies to the publicly insured in samples from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in both the 1988-1994 survey and the 2001-2002 survey. Using the Cox Proportional Hazard model, this study estimates the hazard ratios faced by the privately and publicly insured compared to the uninsured. This study finds the publicly insured face hazards 1.5 times those of the uninsured (p<.001), while the privately insured do not face hazards significantly different from those of the uninsured. Literature suggests that some unobserved characteristic of the publicly insured are influencing their mortality. Interacting with participants health reveals that these differences across groups shrink as health declines. Experimental literature suggests that public insurance lowers the uninsured risk from "healthcare amenable" conditions. Treatment of these conditions may explain the hazard reductions among the uninsured in non-excellent health. The high risk of the publicly insured in excellent health defies explanation.
ContributorsMorita, Aidan James Donnelly (Author) / Veramendi, Gregory (Thesis director) / Zafar, Basit (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
In this paper I seek to understand how consumers value music today by investigating what consumers are willing to pay for digitally downloaded songs (such as the ones available on the iTunes or Amazon music stores) and the variety of factors that influence their willingness to pay. I conducted a survey and received over 500 responses regarding willingness to pay for single-song downloads, consumer sentiment on whether music should be free, streaming service use, and other information pertaining to music consumption behavior. Through this research I found that paid-streamers are willing to pay more for songs than those who do not pay to stream, all else being equal. Further, Free-streamers are not willing to pay significantly more or less than non-streamers. This finding is additional information to other research that suggests streaming acts as a substitute for sales. I also found that most consumers are in the middle when it comes to the debate for whether music should always be free or always be purchased. Where someone aligns on the spectrum is a statistically significant contributing factor to what that person is willing to pay for a song. My findings also suggest that consumer preferences distinguish between benefit derived from music ownership and benefit derived from the ability to listen to music. This information sheds more light on the reason behind the declining digital download market.
ContributorsRodriguez, Stefan Daniel (Author) / Mandel, Naomi (Thesis director) / Veramendi, Gregory (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05