Do Pandemics Change Healthcare? Evidence from the Great Influenza

Rui Esteves, Kris James Mitchener, Peter Nencka and Melissa A. Thomasson

No 10089, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Using newly digitized U.S. city-level data on hospitals, we explore how pandemics alter preferences for healthcare. We find that cities with higher levels of mortality during the Great Influenza of 1918-1919 subsequently expanded hospital capacity by more than cities experiencing less influenza mortality: cities in the top half of the mortality distribution increased their count of hospitals by 8-10 percent in the years after the pandemic. This effect persisted to 1960 and was driven by increases in non-governmental hospitals. Growth responded most in richer cities, exacerbating existing inequalities in access to healthcare. We do not find evidence that government-run hospitals or other types of city-level spending related to healthcare responded to pandemic intensity, suggesting that large health shocks do not necessarily lead to increased public provision of health services.

Keywords: hospitals; healthcare; influenza; pandemics; local public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 I14 J10 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-his and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10089.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Pandemics Change Healthcare? Evidence from the Great Influenza (2022)
Working Paper: Do Pandemics Change Healthcare? Evidence from the Great Influenza (2022)
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:ces:ceswps:_10089

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().