
Melissa ThomassonMiami University | MU · Department of Economics
Melissa Thomasson
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Publications (37)
We explore how access to modern hospitals and medicine affects mortality by leveraging efforts of the Duke Endowment to modernize hospitals in the early twentieth century. The Endowment helped communities build and expand hospitals, obtain state-of-the-art medical technology, attract qualified medical personnel, and refine management practices. We...
The past century witnessed a dramatic improvement in public health, the rise of modern medicine, and the transformation of the hospital from a fringe institution to one essential to the practice of medicine. Despite the central role of medicine in contemporary society, little is known about how hospitals and modern medicine contributed to this heal...
During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–19 flu pandemic to assess the long-run consequences of closing schools on children. We find that the closures h...
We leverage the largest polio outbreak in US history, the 1916 polio epidemic, to study how epidemic-related school interruptions affect educational attainment. Using polio morbidity as a proxy for epidemic exposure, we find that children aged 10 and under, and school-aged children of legal working age with greater exposure to the epidemic experien...
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, medical schools increased standards for admission and added basic science to their curricula. During this time period, the probability a new medical school graduate located in a rural area declined by 40%. Using novel data from the American Medical Directories, we find that physicians trained in mo...
The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history of women's enfranchisement using an economic lens. We examine the demand side, discussing the ris...
Accurate vital statistics are required to understand the evolution of racial disparities in infant health and the causes of rapid secular decline in infant mortality during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, U.S. infant mortality rates prior to 1950 suffer from an upward bias stemming from a severe underregistration of births. At one extre...
We use 20th-century data to examine how community economic conditions at the time of birth influenced various measures of socioeconomic success as adults. Our analysis focuses on the worst downturn ever experienced in the United States: the Great Depression. We merge individual information reported by respondents in the U.S. Censuses of 1970 and 19...
We take advantage of unique data on specific activities conducted under the Sheppard-Towner Act from 1924 through 1929 to focus on how public health interventions affected infant mortality. Interventions that provided one-on-one contact and opportunities for follow-up care, such as home visits by nurses and the establishment of health clinics, redu...
From 1922 to 1929, the Sheppard-Towner Act provided matching grants to states to fund maternal and infant care education initiatives. We examine the effects of this public health program on infant mortality. States engaged in different types of activities, allowing us to examine whether different interventions had differential effects on mortality....
We explore the reasons underlying the striking variation in state participation in the Sheppard-Towner Act. By examining the political economy of Sheppard- Towner at the state level, we find that prior state expenditures on child-life and the number of Catholics in a state were strong predictors of participation in the Sheppard-Towner program. In a...
United States and Canada - Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States. By Kwolek-FollandAngel. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Pp. vii, 275. $27.00. - Volume 60 Issue 1 - Melissa A. Thomasson
This chapter presents new data on mortality rates for 3,054 U.S. counties between 1930 and 1940, a decade that saw unusually severe droughts and high temperatures as well as economic collapse associated with the Great Depression. These conditions could be similar to conditions in many developing countries today should climate change disrupt the mac...
United States and Canada - Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States. By Kwolek-FollandAngel. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Pp. vii, 275. $27.00. - Volume 60 Issue 1 - Melissa A. Thomasson
Health insurance in the United States encompasses a unique blend of private, employment-based insurance for the majority of the population, with governmental provision of insurance for the indigent and the aged. About one in seven Americans is uninsured. Yet despite the complexity of the U.S. system of health insurance, little is known about its in...
Comments on Boustan, Frydman, and Murphy - Volume 67 Issue 2 - Melissa Thomasson
This article uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine the racial gap in health insurance coverage and the extent to which that gap influenced racial differences in health care spending. Results indicate that black households in 1957 were statistically significantly less likely to purchase health insurance than white households, even after contro...
This paper examines the shift in childbirth from home to hospital that occurred in the United States in the early 20th century. Using a panel of city-level data over the period 1928–1940, we examine the impact on maternal mortality resulting from the shift of childbirth from home to hospital. Results suggest that until the late 1930s when sulfa dru...
This paper uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine whether or not Blue Cross and Blue Shield suffered from an adverse selection death spiral after for-profit commercial insurance companies entered the market for health insurance. Results suggest that moving to experience rating may have helped the Blues counteract adverse selection in the group...
This article examines the racial gap in infant mortality rates from 1920 to 1970. Using state-level panel data with information on income, urbanization, women's education, and physicians per capita, we can account for a large portion of the racial gap in infant mortality rates between 1920 and 1945. The educational gap between white and nonwhite wo...
This article examines the racial gap in infant mortality rates from 1920 to 1970. Using state‐level panel data with information on income, urbanization, women's education, and physicians per capita, we can account for a large portion of the racial gap in infant mortality rates between 1920 and 1945. The educational gap between white and nonwhite wo...
In 1954, the Internal Revenue Service stipulated that employer contributions to the health insurance plans of their employees were to be excluded from employee taxable income. Today, the tax subsidy is major feature of the U.S. health care market. This paper examines the initial effects of the tax subsidy on the demand for health insurance using pr...
This paper uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine whether or not Blue Cross and Blue Shield suffered from an adverse selection death spiral after for-profit commercial insurance companies entered the market for health insurance. Results suggest that moving to experience rating may have helped the Blues counteract adverse selection in the group...
Social welfare programs in the United States are designed to serve as safety nets for people in hard times, in contrast with the universal approach found in many other developed western nations. In a survey of Cliometric studies of social welfare programs in the U.S., we examine the variation in the safety net in the U.S. across states in the 20th...
We find disease incidence and prevalence are both higher among Americans in age groups 55-64 and 70-80 indicating that Americans suffer from higher past cumulative disease risk and experience higher immediate risk of new disease onset compared to the English. In contrast, age specific mortality rates are similar in the two countries with an even hi...
From Sickness to Health. The Twentieth-Century Development of the Demand for Health Insurance - Volume 60 Issue 2 - Melissa A. Thomasson