Price Subsidies, Diagnostic Tests, and Targeting of Malaria Treatment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Jessica Cohen, Pascaline Dupas, Simone G. Schaner

NBER Working Paper No. 17943
Issued in March 2012
NBER Program(s):   CH   HE

Both under- and over-treatment of communicable diseases are public bads. But efforts to decrease one run the risk of increasing the other. Using rich experimental data on household treatment-seeking behavior in Kenya, we study the implications of this tradeoff for subsidizing life-saving antimalarials sold over-the-counter at retail drug outlets. We show that a very high subsidy (such as the one under consideration by the international community) dramatically increases access, but nearly half of subsidized pills go to patients without malaria. We study two ways to better target subsidized drugs: reducing the subsidy level and introducing rapid malaria tests over-the-counter.

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This paper was revised on August 29, 2014

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w17943

Published: Jessica Cohen & Pascaline Dupas & Simone Schaner, 2015. "Price Subsidies, Diagnostic Tests, and Targeting of Malaria Treatment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(2), pages 609-45, February. citation courtesy of

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