Work

The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status

Year: 2008

Type: article

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.

Source: American Economic Review

DOI: 10.1257/aer.98.5.1829

Author: Rebecca L Thornton

Institution: University of Michigan

Language: English

Topic: HIV/AIDS Research and Interventions

Subfield: Infectious Diseases

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDGs: Good health and well-being, No poverty

Open Access status: green

Funder: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development