Erez Yoeli
Ph.D. Student

Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago

[curriculum vitae]   [email me]  

Recent Work

Does Birth Control Promote Promiscuity or Improve Health Care? Evidence from Sexually Transmitted Diseases (October 2006)

I examine the behavioral response to new birth-control methods by exploiting inter-state variation in the introduction of the birth-control pill and abortion. Since sexual behavior is hard to observe directly, I use incidence of sexually transmitted diseases as a proxy for risky sexual behavior. I find that STD incidence rose after the legalizations but argue that changes in incidence might overstate changes in sexual behavior because of the way in which diseases spread. The estimated effect of the legalizations on STD incidence disappears after I control for disease dynamics, and the upper bound of these estimates falls dramatically. In light of these findings, I suggest an alternative explanation for observed increases in STD incidence: doctors might have diagnosed more cases of STDs as women came in to obtain prescriptions for the pill. I suggest ways of identifying these changes in screening rates from changes in sexual behavior and find evidence consistent with increased screening rates, especially among women.

Previous Work