Attila Cseh, PhD
Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Finance at Valdosta State University
From Valdosta, GA
From Valdosta, GA
Dr. Attila Cseh joined the Valdosta State University faculty in June 2006. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the University of Kentucky, a Master of Arts in economics from Central Missouri State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences. He previously taught at the University of Kentucky and Central Missouri State University. Prior to entering the field of higher education he worked as a financial analyst for the Hungarian Government Debt Management Agency.
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Professor at Valdosta State University
During this time period, I earned the following awards and recognitions:
* 2017-2019 Rea and Lillian Steele Summer Grant
* 2018 Faculty Scholarship (VSU)
August 2015 - Present
Department Head: Economics and Finance at Valdosta State University
August 2014 - August 2016
Department Head: Marketing and Economics at Valdosta State University
August 2011 - August 2014
Associate Professor at Valdosta State University
During this time period, I earned the following awards and recognitions:
* 2011 Rea and Lillian Steele Summer Grant
* 2011-2015 Faculty Scholarship (VSU)
* 2012 VSU Faculty Research Seed Grant (with Luke Jones)
* 2013, 2014 Quality Research Award
August 2010 - August 2015
Assistant Professor at Valdosta State University
During this time period, I earned the following awards and recognitions:
* 2006-2009 Faculty Development and Instructional Improvement Grant
* 2007-2010 Rea and Lillian Steele Summer Grant
* 2008 Faculty Research Grant
* 2008-2010 Quality Research Award
* 2010 Faculty Scholarship (VSU)
August 2006 - August 2010
Graduate Fellow at University of Kentucky
August 2005 - May 2006
Teaching Assistant at University of Kentucky
During this time period, I earned the following awards and recognitions:
* 2004 Kentucky Opportunity Fellowship, UK
* 2005 Graduate Student Research Fellowship, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research
August 2002 - May 2005
Graduate Assistant at University of Central Missouri
During this time period, I earned the following awards and recognitions:
* 2002-2003 Gatton II Research Fund Fellowship, UK
* 2002 Joseph F. Dolecki Award, CMSU
August 2000 - May 2002
Financial Analyst at Government Debt Management Agency, Hungary
During this time period, I earned the following awards and recognitions:
* 1997 3rd prize at the Student Scientific Conference, BUES
* 1997 Scholarship to spend one semester at CMSU from BUES, Hungary
* 2000 Lucas Sterne and Albert G. Spaeth Scholarship, CMSU
August 1999 - August 2000
“Fracking and Public Health: Evidence from Gonorrhea Incidence in the Marcellus Shale Region.”
Authors: Cseh, A. and T. M. Komarek, 2017. The United States (US) began to experience a boom in natural gas production in the 2000s due to the advent of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling technology. While the natural gas boom affected many people through lower energy prices, the strongest effects were concentrated in smaller communities where the fracking occurred. We analyze one potential cost to communities where fracking takes place: an increase of sexually transmitted diseases. We use a quasi-natural experiment within the Marcellus shale region plus panel data estimation techniques to quantify the impact of fracking activity on local gonorrhea incidences. We found fracking activity to be associated with an increase in gonorrhea. Our findings may be useful to public health officials. To make informed decisions about resource extraction, policy makers as well as regulators and communities need to be informed of all the benefits as well as the costs.
Articles
“Hospital Utilization and Universal Health Insurance Coverage: Evidence from the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act.”
Authors: Cseh, A., B. C. Koford, and R. T. Phelps, 2015. Objective: The Affordable Care Act is currently in the roll-out phase. To gauge the likely implications of the national policy we analyze how the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act impacted various hospitalization outcomes in each of the 25 major diagnostic categories (MDC). Methods: We utilize a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of the Massachusetts reform on insurance coverage and patient outcomes. This identification is achieved using six years of data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. We report MDC-specific estimates of the impact of the reform on insurance coverage and type as well as length of stay, number of diagnoses, and number of procedures. Results: The requirement of universal insurance coverage increased the probability of being covered by insurance. This increase was in part a result of an increase in the probability of being covered by Medicaid. The percentage of admissions covered by private insurance fell. The number of diagnoses rose as a result of the law in the vast majority of diagnostic categories. Our results related to length of stay suggest that looking at aggregate results hides a wealth of information. The most disparate outcomes were pregnancy related. The length of stay for new-born babies and neonates rose dramatically. In aggregate, this increase serves to mute decreases across other diagnoses. Also, the number of procedures fell within the MDCs for pregnancy and child birth and that for new-born babies and neonates. Conclusions: The Massachusetts Health Care Reform appears to have been effective at increasing insurance take-up rates. These increases may have come at the cost of lower private insurance coverage. The number of diagnoses per admission was increased by the policy across nearly all MDCs. Understanding the changes in length of stay as a result of the Massachusetts reform, and perhaps the Affordable Care Act, requires MDC-specific analysis. It appears that the most important distinction to make is to differentiate care related to new-born babies and neonates from that related to other diagnostic categories.
Research Projects
“Older Americans, Depression, and Labor Market Outcomes”
Authors: Koford, B. C. and A. Cseh, 2015. We examine the effect of depressive symptoms on the labor market outcomes of older Americans using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the HRS from 1994 to 2008 and employ panel data methods to control for time-invariant, individual unobserved heterogeneity. Models that do not take into account individual heterogeneity show that depressive symptoms significantly reduce wages for males and females. In contrast, models that explicitly take into account individual heterogeneity through fixed effect estimation show no economic or statistically significant reduction in wages for those with depressive symptoms.
Articles
“Determinants of Students’ Relative Time Allocation Decisions”
Authors: Cseh, A., C. A. Lipscomb, and L. W. Plumly, 2014. This study examines the relationship between various student characteristics and student's time use. In particular, we use ordered probit models to estimate relative time use (work time vs. studying; work time vs. time in extracurricular activities; studying vs. time in extracurricular activities) using data from undergraduate students at a Southern four-year college. Our findings confirm some of the widespread beliefs that a higher grade point average (GPA) is associated with relatively more time spent studying than working or in extracurricular activities, and that higher financial support from family is associated with relatively more time spent in extracurricular activities than both working and studying. On the other hand, our findings also show that the HOPE scholarship and student ability, measured by SAT or ACT scores, do not influence time allocation.
Articles
“Fertility, Sibling Spacing, and Adolescent Exposure to Young Children”
Authors: Gonzalez, L., A. Cseh, and B. C. Koford, 2013. Using six waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we construct a cross-sectional data set composed of the adult children of the HRS respondents. We use this cross-sectional data set to analyze how being exposed to children during one's adolescent years impacts the number of children people choose to have. For younger siblings we measure their exposure to young children by the number of nieces and nephews they have from older siblings (older by some margin). For older siblings we measure their exposure to young children by the number of younger siblings they have (that are younger by some margin). Our findings suggest that adolescent exposure to young children decreases the number of children that people have. We also find that people with older siblings have more children as the age gap increases between them and their older siblings.
Articles
“Human Capital Development: The Case of Sibling Spacing”
Authors: Cseh, A., L. Gonzalez, and B. C. Koford, 2013.
Articles
“The Impact of Maternity Minimum Stay Mandates on Hospitalizations: An Extension”
Authors: Cseh, A. and B. C. Koford, 2010. Due to concerns about the health impacts of deliveries with short postpartum hospital stays, many states—and later the federal government—passed mandates regulating the minimum length of hospitalizations insurance policies had to cover. We use the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project-National Inpatient Sample to analyze whether these mandates have differential impacts on various groups of patients. We find that mandates do have a differential impact based on race and hospital size. These differential effects, however, are not equally present in all analyzed discharge groups.
Articles
“Bringing Economic Data to Life in the Classroom”
Authors: Phelps, R. T. and A. Cseh, 2010. We detail several methods for improving economic instruction through the use of Gapminder World. Gapminder World is a free, simple and engaging internet-based resource for illustrating relationships between key global economic indicators. It presents data in a way that is in line with students' exposure to modern media and its dramatic visual content. The format instantly and intuitively conveys a great deal of information. Real world application and creative presentation are the keys to capturing the increasingly illusive attention and interest of today's student body. This tool can be readily used to energize students' natural curiosity, regarding world events, converting it into genuine motivation to understand economics.
Articles
“The Effect of Employment Status on Mental Distress for Women”
2009. This paper analyzes the effects of employment status and length of time spent without work on mental distress. I use the National Longitudinal Survey - Young Women sample, which provides information on depressive symptoms in various waves of the survey. Panel data techniques are applied to eliminate the potential bias due to unobserved heterogeneity. That is, changes in depressive scores are compared for those who had changes in their employment status and those who had no change in employment. I also seek to identify contributing factors that attenuate or strengthen the effects (if any).
Articles
“The Effects of State Mental Health Parity Legislation on Mental Health Related Hospitalizations”
Authors: Cseh, A. and T. Forgács, 2009. This paper investigates the effects of state level parity legislation on mental health care utilization. Using HCUP NIS data we find that for privately insured patients parity increased the average length of hospital stays by about 3/5 and 3/4 of a day for patients with bipolar disorders and schizophrenia respectively while parity had no effect on the length of stay for patients with major depressive disorders. At the same time parity decreased charges of hospitalization by about 8.5% for bipolar disorders and by 22% for major depressive disorders. We did not find any effects on hospitalization charges for schizophrenia. Our results could be downward biased due to the potential miscategorization of patients who are not subject to parity.
Articles
“The Effects of Depressive Symptoms on Earnings”
2008. Conventional wisdom is that depression lowers productivity. The magnitude of this effect has been of interest to economists and other social scientists as well as medical researchers. In this paper, I take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to investigate the effects from a dynamic perspective and to control for unobserved heterogeneity in a fixed-effects framework. Exploiting the fact that the data set provides information about depressive symptoms in multiple years, I am able to study how changes in depressive symptoms impact productivity. My results indicate that taking personality into account is important in estimating how depression affects wages. While ordinary least-squares results render a strong negative significant effect to depressive symptom measures (especially in the men's sample), taking unobserved personal characteristics into account reduces the effects of these measures.
Articles
“Labor Market Consequences of State Mental Health Parity Mandates”
2008. This paper analyzes the effects of state mental health parity mandates on the labor and insurance markets. In particular, I investigate the effect of parity regulations along five margins: having employer provided health insurance coverage, employer contributions to health insurance premiums, the probability of full-time employment, working hours, and wages for a sample of private workers in firms with less than 100 employees using the Annual Demographic Surveys (March CPS) for the years 1999-2004 (and also in an extended sample of CPS 1992-2004). It is hypothesized that if parity mandates are costly they will have an impact on at least one of the above margins. I find no evidence for any of the most feared impact: a reduction in the probability of having employer-provided health insurance coverage or that state mental health parity mandates have decreased the generosity of employers' contributions to health insurance premiums. The results also lack any evidence of an impact on labor market composition or of costs having been passed onto workers in terms of lower wages.
Articles
Earning responsibility increases risk taking among representative decision makers
Previous experiments on representative decision making find that social responsibility alters risk-taking behavior relative to individuals making decisions for only themselves. However, these experiments confer the position of social responsibility through random assignment. In the field, people who are responsible for making decisions on behalf of others typically do not assume the position by pure chance, but instead ‘earn’ social responsibility on a basis of merit. Experiments on earned roles in other areas of economics suggest this may induce more self-regarding behavior. We conduct laboratory experiments to investigate how self-determining one's role as a representative decision maker influences subsequent risk-taking behavior. Using a one-shot binary lottery choice and a between-subjects design, we compare the risk-taking behavior of representatives under randomly assigned social responsibility with that of representatives under earned responsibility and with that of participants making decisions only for themselves. We find that when participants earn social responsibility through performance in a pre-game task, they report considering their dependents less and exhibit significantly more risk taking than those who receive responsibility through random assignment. Those who earn social responsibility behave like individuals without dependents, while those who receive social responsibility through random assignment—consistent with previous studies—display less risk taking (over moderate probability gains prospects) than individuals operating by themselves.
Articles
Personality and Risk Aversion in Representative Decision Making
We use a laboratory experiment to analyze how personality characteristics influence risk preference with and without randomly assigned anonymous dependents. In three treatments with dependents, we randomly group participants into pairs - a decision maker and a dependent. The decision maker of each pair faces a choice between a certain payment and a binary lottery of higher expected value. The decision maker role within each pair is either determined by random assignment (RANDOM), or earned based on performance in a pregame (MERIT1, MERIT2). We compare choices in the three treatments to choices of decision makers without a dependent (SELF). We find that individuals with higher scores on agreeableness are more likely to choose the safe option when their decision affects a dependent. We find that higher scores on neuroticism are associated with increased probability of safe choice if the decision maker position is earned (instead of assigned randomly).
Articles