The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) is delighted to invite you to a special talk on:
Randomized Regulation: The impact of minimum quality standards on health markets
Speaker: Jishnu Das, Senior Visiting Fellow at CPR and Professor, Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Tuesday, 20 December 2022, 4 PM IST onwards. The event will be conducted at the CPR office Conference Room (Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi).
About the Paper
The paper reports results from the first randomization of a regulatory reform in the health sector. The reform established minimum quality standards for patient safety, an issue that has become increasingly salient following the Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics. In our experiment, all 1348 health facilities in three Kenyan counties were classified into 273 markets, and the markets were then randomly allocated to treatment and control groups. Government inspectors visited health facilities and, depending on the results of their inspection, recommended closure or a timeline for improvements. The intervention increased compliance with patient safety measures in both public and private facilities (more so in the latter) and reallocated patients from private to public facilities without increasing out-of-pocket payments or decreasing facility use. In treated markets, improvements were equally marked throughout the quality distribution, consistent with a simple model of vertical differentiation in oligopolies. Our paper thus establishes the use of experimental techniques to study regulatory reforms and, in doing so, shows that minimum standards can improve quality across the board without adversely affecting utilization.
About the Speaker
Jishnu Das is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Jishnu’s work focuses on health and education in low and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on social markets, or common, but complex, conflagrations of public and private education and health providers operating in a small geographical space.
Jishnu helped write the World Development Report on Gender and Development and in 2015 he was the Flander’s Visiting Professor at McGill University. He has received the George Bereday Award from the Comparative and International Education Society, the Stockholm Challenge Award for the best ICT project in the public administration category in 2006 and the Research Academy award from the World Bank in 2017 and 2013 for research on health and education. He is currently working on health inspections (Kenya), Tuberculosis (India) and education programs (Pakistan).
