TY  - JOUR
AU  - Dow,William H.
AU  - Holmes,Jessica
AU  - Philipson,Tomas
AU  - Sala-i-Martin,Xavier
TI  - Disease Complementarities and the Evaluation of Public Health           Interventions
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5216
PY  - 1995
Y2  - August 1995
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5216
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5216.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
William H. Dow
University of California, Berkeley
School of Public Health
239 University Hall, #7360
Berkeley, CA 94720-7360
Tel: 510/643-5439
Fax: 510/643-6981
E-Mail: wdow@berkeley.edu

Tomas Philipson
Irving B. Harris Graduate School
of Public Policy Studies
University of Chicago
1155 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/502-7773
E-Mail: t-philipson@uchicago.edu

Xavier Sala-i-Martin
Department of Economics
Columbia University
420 West 118th Street, 1005
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-7055
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: xs23@columbia.edu
AB  - This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality.  The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other causes.  This means that a specific public health intervention has benefits other than the direct medical reduction in mortality: it affects the incentives to fight other diseases so the overall reduction in mortality will, in general, be larger than that predicted by the direct medical effects.  We discuss evidence of these cross-disease effects by using data on neo-natal tetanus vaccination through the Expanded Programme on Immunization of the World Health Organization.
ER  -