The Effect of Healthcare on Health Risk Perceptions: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines

This thesis examines whether public helath clinic visits improve the accuracy of individuals' perceived cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Misperceptions about one's own health is common and may contribute to individuals engaging in unhealthy behavior. However, there is limited causal evidence on whether attending a clinic can correct them. I use a randomized encouragement design field experiment in the Philippines (Capuno et al., 2021) to study the effect of clinic attendance on risk perceptions, misperceptions, and commonly suggested driver of misperception: comparative optimism bias. Participants in the treatment group were encouraged to attend a public clinic by receiving a lottery ticket. Therefore, lottery assignment serves as an instrument for clinic attendance. This instrumental variables approach estimates the effect of a check up on CVD risk perceptions and misperceptions. A central hypothesis of the study is that clinic visits update risk beliefs toward the true health risk, reducing misperception. To explore comparative optimism bias, the analysis explores whether perceptions about one's own health risk and the health risk of others repond differently to clinic visits.