2. "The Impact of Education on Morttality: Evidence from a Compulsory Education Reform"

A negative relation between schooling and health have been observed by social scientists. However, these associations may not necessarily represent causal effect due to the presence of omitted variable or reverse causality from health to education. Taking advantage of a compulsory education reform in Taiwan, we attempt to identify the impact of education on health, as measured by mortality. The data used in this research come from the 2000 Population Census and the 1999–2008 death records of Taiwan, where there was an extension of compulsory education from six to nine years. We find that education does have an impact on mortality for men, but not for women.

3. "The impact of global budgeting on treatment intensity and outcomes" (with Shu-Fen Li and Wei-Der Tsai)

In this study, we use patient level data to examine the intensity of treatment received by patients suffering acute myocardial infarction (AMI), ischemic heart disease, hemorrhagic stroke, and ischemic stroke patients, and their health outcomes after treatment in Taiwan, where global budgets for hospitals were launched in 2002. We find that the launch of global budgets has led to an increase in the intensity of treatment received by patients admitted to a for-profit hospital and not very much improvement in their health outcomes. These results indicates that the increase in treatment intensity represent a misallocation or waste of resources.

4. "The Fertility Effect of Education: Regression Discontinuity for Counts and Exponential Models" (with Myoung-jae Lee)

Negative relations between women's schooling and fertility have been observed by social scientists, leading some of them to propose education as a policy tool for family planning. Both fertility and schooling are, however, choice variables that may be affected by some common factors. This would then make schooling endogenous, and consequently, the observed negative relationships might not be causal. We take advantage of a compulsory education law change to estimate the impact of female education on fertility, using regression discontinuity estimators motivated by exponential regression models appropriate for counts or non-negative response variables. Our data utilizes the entire 1990 Population Census of Taiwan. We find that married women's schooling has no impact on their number of children and the age at first-birth.

5. "Emergency Room Physician Staffing and Patient Mortality" (with Wei-Der Tsai)

This paper examines the relationship between hospital effective physician staffing level and patient treatment outcomes. The data we use consists of patients suffering from acute myocardial infarction (AMI), ischemic heart disease, or heart failure, and were admitted to the emergency room of a hospital. We measure the effective physician level in a particular day by the number of physicians on duty in the emergency room of a hospital and the number of patients admitted to the emergency room. We also control for the specialties of the physicians who are on duty. Our data come from the claim records of the Taiwan's National Health Insurance. We find that after controlling for hospital fixed effects the total number of physicians in the emergency room and the number of emergency medicine specialists have a negative effect on acute heart disease patients' mortality, while the volume of patients and number of heart specialists do not have any effect.