The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status

Abstract

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 percent of the participants learned their HIV results. However, even the smallest incentive doubled that share. Using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of HIV status, sexually active HIV-positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active HIV-positive individuals who did not learn their results; however, HIV-positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not. There is no significant effect of learning HIV-negative status on the purchase of condoms.

Is There a Need to Mitigate the Social and Financial Consequences of Tuberculosis at the Individual and Household Level?

“…Patients who otherwise would not be likely to seek a diagnosis, would fail to pick up the test result or who would be likely to discontinue treatment prematurely due to the associated direct medical and non-medical costs are encouraged and enabled to pursue treatment because some of the expenses are covered or offset by the value of the transfer. While a study in Malawi has shown that small cash transfers can significantly increase the likelihood of people returning to pick up their HIV test result [40], a transfer may be easier to implement and justify once a patient is diagnosed and needs treatment for a period of at least 6 months.…”

Factors affecting immunization among children of rural population of block Malpura, district Tonk, Rajasthan, India

“…A number of previous studies have shown that uptake of preventive behaviours is very sensitive to small incentives that can play a role in promoting preventive health services. [16][17][18] …”

Productivity and Health: Alternative Productivity Estimates Using Physical Activity

“…Workers who receive information that they are malaria negative respond with higher levels of physical activity. This provides complementary evidence that workers shift effort in response to health perceptions , and is further evidence of general behavioral responses to health information (see Madejewicz et al (2007), Jalan & Somanathan (2008), Thornton (2008), Dupas (2011), Cohen et al (2015, Gong (2014), Baird et al (2014)). …”