The results persist if we include controls for municipalities or states that lie on the USA-Mexico border.
Regarding location variables two sets of results are presented: controlling for municipality size (seven categories) or by postal code.
Still, when need factors were controlled for, municipalities with integrated health and social care sectors had similar patterns in access to care and similar costs as compared to municipalities without such integration.
Among individual characteristics we include as control variables dummies for municipality of residence, gender, age, and its square, years of education, marital status and a dummy variable indicating if the individual is the head of the household.
We determined counts of case-patients and controls for each of the municipalities using ArcGIS.
To account for correlation within municipalities, we adjusted for municipality as a random effects variable.
In a time when regulators and constituents are growing increasingly concerned with municipal fraud, abuse, waste and inefficiencies, developing a well-designed, effective internal control system is key for municipalities to curb these issues.
After initial hypotheses-generating interviews, we performed a case-control study with the first fifteen cases and three controls for each case matched by age, sex and municipality.
Given the multilevel structure of the data (individuals over time within municipalities), we will control for stable differences between municipalities using a so-called fixed-effects model.
This was due to difficulties in finding suitable controls, for example if the RS adolescent had been born in a small municipality.
