[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Obstetric Unit Closures and Racial/Ethnic Disparity in Health

Pinka Chatterji, Chun-Yu Ho and Xue Wu

No 30986, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper examines whether loss of locally available hospital-based obstetric services affects racial/ethnic disparities in intrapartum care access and birth outcomes in rural areas of the US. To conduct causal inference, we combine difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods to control for observable and time-invariant unobservable heterogeneity across counties. Using data from Vital Statistics birth certificate records from 2005-2018 from rural counties in the mainland US, our empirical analysis reaches several findings. Women in counties that lost obstetric services are more likely to receive intrapartum care outside their counties of residence and to deliver in an urban county compared to women in matched counties. Nonetheless, there are no consistent effects of obstetric unit closure on maternal and infant health in the full sample. Among Black mothers, however, obstetric unit closure is not associated with delivering in an urban county, and there is a more consistent pattern of negative effects of closure on infant health. Importantly, the adoption of scope-of-practice laws for certified nurse midwives, the adoption of telehealth payment parity laws and the ACA Medicaid expansions have implications for narrowing racial/ethnic disparities in health in response to obstetric unit closures.

JEL-codes: I0 I1 I11 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hea and nep-ure
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30986.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30986

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30986

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-10
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30986