Volume 35, Number 3 (Summer) 2000
Boozer, Michael A. and Tomas J. Philipson. 2000. "The Impact of Public Testing for Human Immunodeficiency Virus." Journal of Human Resources 35(3):419-446.
In this paper, we estimate the behavioral responses by individuals to the type of information-intervention a public human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing program would typify. A unique feature of the data we use is that the survey itself altered the allocation of information held by respondents by administrating a blood test for HIV as part of a longitudinal survey. Our framework for the demand for information on HIV implies that because only individuals who are surprised by the results of the intervention respond to it, in our case low-risk individuals who test HIV-positive or high-risk individuals who test HIV-negative, and information-intervention of this type may have surprising effects. Our framework also implies that looking just at the aggregate effects of an HIV testing program is a misleading indicator of the behavioral responsiveness of the average individual to the information intervention. We find that although the aggregate effect of the testing program is quite small, the effects disaggregated by private beliefs are consistent with information elastic behavior for the average individual. In addition, the subgroups of the population affected by a publicly subsidized testing program may have roughly offsetting behavioral responses, which may lead to little effect or possibly even perverse outcomes with regards to an objective of lowering disease transmission.
Michael A. Boozer is an assistant professor of economics at Yale University. Tomas J. Philipson is a professor at the University of Chicago in the B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy, the Department of Economics, and the Law School. The authors are thankful to Joseph Cantania and Stephen Hulley at the AIDS Prevention Center at UCSF for provision of the SFHHS data. They thank David Card, David Cutler, Robert Hall, Lawrence Katz, Michael Kremer, John Londregan, Melissa Napolitano, Stephen Pischke, Paul Schultz, Edward Vytlacil, and seminar participants at Princeton, Yale, MIT/Harvard, the Hoover Institution, the Federal Trade Commission, the World Bank, and the 1994 Health Economics Conference at Penn for helpful comments. This work was partly carried out while Philipson was a visitor at Yale University in 1994. Boozer acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant SBR 9409917) and the Olin Foundation. The data used in this article can be requested beginning March 2001 through February 2004 from Tomas Philipson, Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy, The Department of Economics, and The Law School, The University of Chicago.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X