Second Annual Conference on Behavioral Health Economics

Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) will be hosting its second annual Conference on Behavioral Health Economics, to be held Oct. 16, 2015 in Berkeley. The conference will cover various topics related to the causes and understanding of health behaviors and decision-making. The event is jointly organized with the Berkeley Population Center, Initiative for Behavioral Economics and Finance, the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging, and the Institute for International Studies.

Agenda

8:30 – 8:55          Breakfast and Registration

8:55 – 10:30      Session 1: Incentives

Session Chair: Paul Gertler, UC Berkeley

Mushfiq Mobarak, Yale University — “Bolstering Demand for Sanitation in Bangladesh”

Charles Sprenger, UC San Diego — “Using Preference Estimates to Customize Incentives: An Application to Polio Vaccination Drives in Pakistan”

10:30 – 11:00    Break

11:00 – 12:30    Session 2: Behavioral Health

Session Chair: Dana Carney, UC Berkeley

Oliver John, UC Berkeley — “Personality, Psychology, and Health”

Frank Schilbach, MIT — “Alcohol and Self-Control:  A Field Experiment in India”

12:30 – 1:30       Lunch

1:30 – 3:00          Session 3: Big Data

Session Chair: Aprajit Mahajan, UC Berkeley

Maya Petersen, UC Berkeley — “The Value of Machine Learning in Public Health Evaluations”

Jonathan Kolstad, UC Berkeley — “Big Data and Health Insurance Product Selection”

3:00 – 3:30          Break

3:30 – 5:00          Session 4: Nice Unrelated Papers

Session Chair: Ben Handel, UC Berkeley

Harsha Thirumurthy, UNC Chapel Hill — “The effects of providing fixed compensation and lottery-based rewards on uptake of medical male circumcision in Kenya: a randomized trial”

Berber Kramer, IFPRI — “From awareness to adverse selection: Intra-household allocations of health insurance in Nigeria”

5:00 – 6:00          Reception