An empirical investigation of why doctors migrate and women fail to go for screening

In my first paper 1 examine the impact of short-term economic shocks on physician migration using a new panel dataset on physician migration from 31 African countries to the US and the UK. I estimate distributed-lag regressions of log migration on economic growth, I also instrument for growth using rainfall and changes in terms of trade. Overall I find a significant effect of economic conditions: a one percentage point decline in lagged growth increases physician out-migration by approximately 0.3 percent. In the IV models, a one percentage point decline in lagged growth increases physician out-migration by between 3.4 and 3.6 percent.;In my second paper, I examine the impact of doctors' earnings. The Ghanaian Government in 1998 instituted a scheme known as the Additional Duty Hours Allowance (ADHA) Scheme which compensated doctors for any additional hours worked beyond the standard 40 hours a week/160 hours a month. I exploit this natural experiment to derive estimates of the impact of doctors' earnings. Using innovative new methods developed by Abadie et al. (2007) and applying it to physician stock data, collected by Docquier et al. (2007), I find that by 2004 - six years after the program was instituted - the foreign stock of Ghanaian physicians had reduced by between 10 and 13 percent and attribute this directly to the effect of the ADHA program.;In my third paper I examine the demand for preventive care. Cervical cancer is the most common cancer among women in developing countries. Despite compelling evidence that cervical cancer screening has reduced morbidity and mortality in developed countries, screening rates in many developing countries remain low. In this paper I examine the importance of demand-side factors on take-up of cervical screening. Using a randomized design, I test for the impact of price. I also test for the impact of a conditional cancer treatment subsidy. Overall I find a significant impact of both interventions. A N10 increase in price of screening reduced take-up of the program by between 7 and 8 percentage points while women selected to receive the cancer treatment subsidy were about 4 percentage points more likely to participate in screening.