John E. Kushman

Service Consciousness and Service Knowledge among Older Americans

This article explores statistical relationships between socioeconomic characteristics of elderly persons in a large region of California and their consciousness and knowledge of services available to them. Regression and probit estimation are used to analyze survey data. Service knowledge is a prerequisite to utilization or informal referrals and general consciousness of services increases the probability that older persons will search for services to meet their needs. Education, age, sex, rurality, and minority status are found to be associated with service consciousness and knowledge, although a number of other characteristics have significant associations for at most a few services.

A Three-Sector Model of Day Care Center Services

Political pressures for increased subsidization of child care and tax and welfare reform have combined with sociodemographic trends to raise important empirical questions about the market for day care services. This paper addresses a number of these questions in the context of a model that treats government, private nonprofit, and for-profit producers separately. Data from North Carolina for 1973 are used in the analysis. It is shown that the three types of centers produce quite different types of care for different markets. Market level demand functions are estimated for the care of each type of center using Tobit analysis. The sectors show different responses to demand determinants such as income and labor force opportunities. Some implications of the estimates for public policy are discussed.

Measuring the impact of different veterinary service programs on dairy herd health and milk production

Abstract This paper presents estimates of the relative impacts on reproductive status, the incidence of mastitis, and milk production of different types of veterinary service programs. The effects of veterinary services, categorized as emergency, scheduled and mixed, were modeled as a recursive system in which services affect herd health and health affects milk output. Veterinary services also affect milk output directly. Estimates are based on a small sample of dairies from the Tulare milkshed of California, and attention is concentrated on obtaining accurate data and addressing conceptual problems in modeling the effects of veterinary services. The data were pooled over dairies and months. Multiple regression was used to estimate production or yield functions for measures of herd reproductive health, under health, and milk. The data were corrected for autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity in the regression residuals. Students t -statistic was used for test of significance. The estimated yield equations were used to calculate changes in health and milk output from changes in veterinary services. Currently available measures of herd reproductive status may not be valid for measuring reproductive health, because they confound management decisions with health status. Available data on udder health are satisfactory. The relative effects of different veterinary service programs were found to differ according to the aspects of herd performance being examined, and it may be important to account for indirect effects of scheduled services that are manifested through management.

Pricing Health Services Verification of a Monopoly Pricing Model for Dentistry

A model of monopoly with constant marginal costs is used to derive a price function for dental services. The implications of the model are tested using data on individual practitioners from a national survey. The implications of the model are met by the data, providing strong evidence of the appropriateness of the monopoly model to analyses of the market for dental services. The empirical evidence also provides substantial information on the determinants of dental fees.

A Spatial Analysis of Primary Health Care Markets in Rural Areas

An exponential spatial interaction model was used to analyze primary-health-care-seeking patterns of rural consumers in northern California. A macrotheory of spatial interaction and a microtheory of consumer search were combined as a logically consistent rationale for the model. Ordinary least squares proved superior to nonlinear least squares and a limited dependent variable maximum likelihood technique in predicting health-care-seeking patterns. The model was used to address policy questions including the impact of removing local providers on patient flows to remaining providers and the market shares that could be expected by a new provider.

A model of individual household temperature demand and energy-related welfare changes using satiety

Abstract A model of the utility-maximizing household is developed in which data on satiety levels for indoor temperature can be used along with budget constraint parameters and actual temperature choices to estimate parameters of the utility function. Using the utility parameters, equivalent variations in income can be estimated to measure welfare effects of policy and price changes that effect home heating. All of these operations can be performed at the individual household level and for any member of a popular class of utility function forms. The required data are easy to obtain, although they typically are not collected in household surveys.

Welfare Evaluations in Contingent Valuation Experiments with Discrete Responses: Comment

In a previous issue of this Journal, Michael Hanemann developed three interpretations for compensating and equivalent variations in discrete choice models and the corresponding computational approaches. Hanemann then showed that one of the three interpretations is inconsistent with ordinal utility and that one of the remaining interpretations is preferable because of the statistical properties of the corresponding computational approach. This note clarifies the interpretation of Hanemanns preferred computational approach and offers an alternative interpretation. It should strengthen the case for the preferred approach that researchers can agree on computation without necessarily agreeing on its interpretation.