Information, Subjective Expectations, and Beliefs: Essays on the Determinants of Health-Seeking Decisions

Individuals' behaviours are vital determinants of health outcomes. Understanding how people make decisions and how to steer their choices is a vital question for public and private healthcare providers. Across my three chapters, I seek to provide evidence on 1) how inaccurate beliefs lead to poor healthcare choices and 2) how to effectively educate individuals and improve their health seeking decisions. My first chapter compares the effectiveness of giving information with and without individual agency in the process. Effective health education campaigns could help people make better choices for their health; however, these programmes seldom lead to sustained changes in knowledge, beliefs, or behaviour. In an experiment in Ghana with 2,500 women, I demonstrate that participants who are given a choice to learn about the new malaria vaccine engage more with the message, compared to receiving the same information passively. My second chapter assesses parental beliefs about health needs of different children and models how these beliefs impact long-term outcomes. Poor health in childhood leads to worse education and labour market outcomes in later life. A key determinant of a child's health are parental decisions to seek appropriate and timely care. In an experiment in Zambia with 13,000 caregivers, I show a parental bias against girls over the age of 5, who are seen as needing less healthcare. Modelling the impact of this bias, I estimate the effects on girls' earnings in later life. In my third chapter, I will investigate non-adherence to treatment regimens (e.g., not completing a course of antibiotics) in rural Uganda. The causes of non-adherence are complex: financially constrained households aim to save medicines for future illnesses, while understanding of disease is often limited in this context. Partnering with a private non-profit primary care provider, I will conduct an experiment to estimate the relative importance of these financial and knowledge barriers to treatment non-adherence.