Media Coverage

Robert M. Townsend's study “The Great Equalizer: Health Care Access and Infant Mortality in Thailand,” with Jonathan Gruber and Nathaniel Hendren and funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, found that reducing out-of-pocket costs of medical care had less of an impact than providing more money to hospitals. The study, forthcoming in the American Economics Journal: Applied Economics, also suggests that health reforms should make reimbursements to health care providers a primary concern for any effective health reforms.

Townsend lectured at the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Insitute on May 7th. He discussed work that provides an algorithm for approaching policy advice related to the financial systems of developing countries (and others) using a combination of theory and data. In this lecture, Townsend provided a brief review of CGE and DSGE models; an applied general equilibrium development approach; and the relationship among these approaches.

The Economist blog "Schumpeter" examines Thailand's microfinance program, citing the findings of Robert M. Townsend and Joseph Kaboski's 2011 paper, "A Structural Evaluation of a Large-Scale Quasi-Experimental Microfinance Initiative."

Robert M. Townsend was quoted by New York Times writer Thomas Fuller in an article discussing Thailand youth's declining interest in rice farming, one of the country's largest export crops. Townsend specifically commented on the relative size of debt of farmers as well as the diversification of income of farming families, who typically also own and run small enterprises in addition to farming. These findings come from Townsend's monthly survey of Thai villages, which has been collecting data since 1998.