Nieves Valdes

• Ph.D. in Economics
• Professor (Assistant) at Adolfo Ibáñez University

Cancer is the second leading cause of death for children, and leukemias are the most common pediatric cancer diagnoses in Chile. Childhood cancer is a traumatic experience and is associated with distress, pain, and other negative experiences for patients and their families. Thus, psychosocial costs represent a large part of the overall burden of ca...

Studies on parental smoking behavior have mostly been conducted for developed countries and show that current parental smoking is negatively associated with children's current health. Using four waves of a Chilean longitudinal survey (Encuesta de Protección Social), we estimate probit and ordinary least squares models relating parents' self-report...

Medical care for children with cancer is complex and expensive, and represents a large financial burden for families around the world. We estimated the medical cost of cancer care for children under the age of 18, using administrative records of the universe of children with private insurance in Chile in the period 2007-2018, based on a sample of 3...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of a long-run causal relationship between GDP and health care expenditures, for a group of Latin American and the Caribbean countries and for OECD countries for the period 1995-2014. We estimated the income elasticity of health expenditure to be equal to unity for both groups of countries, tha...

Objective To measure the likelihood of delivery by caesarean section (C-section) for publicly insured births as compared with privately insured births, across all hospitals and within private hospitals. Design Repeated cross-sectional analysis. Setting The universe of hospital births in 15 regions of Chile. Participants 2 405 082 singleton birth...

This paper presents new evidence regarding the effects of legalization on the training of immigrants who were granted legal status through the US Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. Our findings point to a large increase in the immigrants’ incidence of training relative to comparable groups of natives following legalization. While tr...

This paper exploits state health education (HED) reforms as quasi-natural experiments to estimate the causal impact of HED received by children on their parents' physical activity. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the period 1999-2005 merged with data on state HED reforms from the National Association of State Boards of Educa...