Interview with James Hamilton
The Berkeley Electronic Press’ Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics journal has a video interview with James Hamilton, a UCSD economist and one of the best instructors I have had.
Author: Jason Shafrin
“Flogging” Patients
How much care should doctors give to terminally ill patients in the ICU? This is a question which can be answered on many levels (e.g., societal, individual, technical). One physician gives his thoughts in an n+1 magazine article titled “First, do no harm.” While advanced medical technology has lead to greater longevity and healthier lives,…
Brain Tumor vaccine
Have scientists found a vaccine for brain tumors? Scientists have found that the cytomegalovirus is present in the 90% of glioblastoma brain tumors. The Economist reports on two doctors who are attempting to create a vaccine for the cytomegalovirus which (hopefully) can greatly reduce the incidence of brain tumors around the world.
Explaining the Mortgage Meltdown
NPR’s This American Life has a great episode (“The Giant Pool of Money“) explaining in a non-technical, entertaining manner how the “credit crunch” came upon us. The episode looks at all the parts of the mortgage-backed securities chain: home owners and borrowers, brokers, banks, rating agencies, Wall Street, and foreign and domestic investors. A special…
Health Insurance, Physician Compensation and the Quantity of Medical Care
Many studies have attempted to determine how the manner in which physicians are compensated by health insurance companies affects the quantity of medical care provided. Today I will summarize some seminal studies in this field. Epstein, Begg and McNeil (NEJM 1986) In this study, the authors examine whether or not there is a difference in…
Custom-made versus ready-to-wear treatment
Many patients have an idealized view that physicians customize their treatments for each individual patient. For instance, do physicians tailor prescription dosage based on individual characteristics and responses over time, or will they simple prescribe the standard dosage? A paper by Frank and Zeckhuaser (JHE 2007) find that norm-following behavior (rather than patient-by-patient customization) is…
Why Economists support Free Trade
Economist Greg Mankiw reveals the answer in the “Trade: why not?” post on The Free Exchange blog.
Employers must be involved in health insurance?
At least Joe Paduda thinks so. His post today gives an example from the employer GTE. GTE was worried about ER and inpatient admissions rate for children with asthma. Why? Because employees who were single parents would miss work to take care of their children when they were sick. Mr. Paduda’s argues convincingly that employers…
Sample Selection vs. Two-part Model
Much of health care data is characterized by a large cluster of data at 0, and a right skewed distribution of the remaining outcomes. For instance, people who do not get sick generally use $0 of medical care. Those who do get sick, use a varying amount of medical care dollars, but there are a…
Do we finally know how vaccines work?
Vaccines work well because of an adjuvant. The adjuvant boosts immunity but physicians did not know how it worked until now. The Economist reports (“A shot in the dark not more“) that Stephanie Eisenbarth, Richard Flavell an co-authors have discovered that the adjuvant “works by stimulating bits of the immune system called NOD-like receptors.” Why…