Your reflection response is to be written in PROSE, but NO more than 700 words single spaced.
You may NOT include any direct quotes, or you will get NO credit.
Include a citation referencing the assigned paper using the proper format (economists often use Chicago style—in the text include the author’s name and publication year such as Abrams, Clarke, and Mehta (2021) and Chicago for the reference listed at the end).
As with all of your work, please write CLEARLY and CONCISELY.
In your prose, be sure to address the following questions:
Which two strands of the health economics literature do the authors say that their work is closest to?
What research question do the authors answer in this paper? (It’s hard to find written as a sentence in the intro as most of the papers you read do. Use this as a lesson for your own writing—include your empirical research question in a clear, accessible format in the intro! Instead, look to the title and abstract and Section II.)
What feature of the introduction of MMC in CA do the authors use to identify the causal effects of MMC on the study outcomes?
Do providers who treat patients covered by MMC in Texas receive more compensation for high-cost patients? Explain.
Do MCC plans in Texas have discretion over which services enrollees receive?
Explain in plain words (i.e., no jargon) what the authors mean by risk selection.
Can MMC plans in Texas drop patients? Under what conditions?
Which four different subgroups do the authors examine the effect of the rollout of MMC on? Describe them by their race/ethnicity, eligibility for Medicaid, and likely costs to the insurer.
What is the main data source the authors use in their study? What information do these data contain that is useful to the researchers?
Which months and years of conceptions do the authors study? Which years span the MMC rollout in TX (that the authors study)?
The authors use the statistics in Table 1 to identify which treatment groups are likely to be high- versus low-cost and which placebo groups are likely to be high-versus low-cost. Compare the likelihood of being born preterm or with low birth weight for US Black, US Hispanic, Foreign Black, Foreign Hispanic.
Describe what Table 2 shows concerning differences in costs to insurers for Black versus Hispanic infants (column 1).
Interpret the coefficient estimate (sign and significance) on MMS in Table 3, columns 3 and 4.
Interpret Figure 2. Are the trends parallel in the pre period? Do the effects grow over time?
Interpret Table 5 and describe why the authors include this in the paper. Note that the coefficient estimates are now the effect of MMC in a county for Hispanic respondents only. In this table, they are showing that foreign-born Hispanic moms provide a reasonable placebo test for US born Hispanic moms. (The analogous table for Black moms is in the appendix—there were few foreign-born Black moms in Texas making it a less powerful statistical test.)
Interpret the sign and significance of the coefficient estimates on “Conceived after MMC” in columns 5, 6, 9, and 10 in Table 6.
Do the authors think the results in Table 6 explain the findings reported in Tables 3 and 4?
Discuss the back-of-the-envelope calculation on pages 279-280. How much does the introduction of MMC increase costs per infant?