Adequate and Appropriate Health Care

What are the effects lower prices and better information on the use of healthcare for children? Anja Sautmann and her co-authors have examined this questions by collecting diary-style health data over 10 weeks, which allows them to study the demand for healthcare conditional on health status and need for care as defined by the World Health Organization. They show that lower prices for care can reduce under-use without significantly increasing over-use according to WHO criteria. Her latest work centres on the overprescription of malaria medications and antibiotics at the provider. With her collaborators, she investigates incentive structures that can resolve the "informed expert problem" by aligning patient and provider interest in matching treatment and diagnosis.

In earlier work in Mali, Ms Sautmann has investigated how credit constraints affect the experimental measurement of time preferences and intertemporal rates of substitution. Moreover, she has studied the "inflation" of dowry payments and the connection with the increase in population growth in India, as well as the role of age preferences for marriage age patterns and in particular assortative matching by age. Other research, funded by a doctoral dissertation research award from the National Science Foundation, concerns the effects of biased self-beliefs on employer-employee relationships and the design of incentivised wage contracts.

Ms Sautmann's research interests cover a range of topics in microeconomics and development economics. She is a collaborator on two research projects on the delivery and funding of healthcare in Bamako, Mali, supported by Development Frontier Awards from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Anja Sautmann completed her undergraduate work at the University of Munich and earned her PhD at New York University. Ms Sautmann began as Assistant Professor of Economics at Brown University in 2010 and spent a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale Center of Economic Growth.