American Economic Journal:
Applied Economics
ISSN 1945-7782 (Print) | ISSN 1945-7790 (Online)
Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
vol. 11,
no. 4, October 2019
(pp. 210–39)
Abstract
Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region's transplant wait list, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates.Citation
Dickert-Conlin, Stacy, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser. 2019. "Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 11 (4): 210–39. DOI: 10.1257/app.20170476Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D47 Market Design
- I11 Analysis of Health Care Markets
- I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
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