HWR is up
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at the Health Affairs blog.
Author: Jason Shafrin
High quality schools don’t improve learning?!?!
Do students who attend better schools preform better academically? This is tautologically correct, but not very informative. What would happen if we randomly moved students from low quality schools to high quality schools? Would they do better? Using the results from Chicago Public Schools randomized lotteries of elementary studies, Julie Cullen–my dissertation adviser–attempts to answer…
When do Consumers Search?
In classical economics models, supply and demand curves create a unique market price. Anyone who has shopped around for a good deal, however, knows that there is often significant price dispersion, even for homogeneous goods. For instance, gas prices can often vary greatly within a single neighborhood. On Monday I attended a seminar by Matthew…
How patents skew medical research
There is an interesting article from the Techdirt blog about “How patents skew medical research.” The blog post states “The monopoly power granted by patents pushes all research money into only things that can be patented, ignoring other possible cures, even if they can be both profitable and quite helpful.” The post includes an example…
Health Care System Grudge Match: Canada vs. U.S.
Who has a better health care system: Canada or the U.S. Michael Moore would vote for Canada. Libertarians would side with the U.S. A new NBER working paper by June O’Neill and Dave O’Neill concludes that the two systems may produce more similar health outcomes than was previously believed. History of the Canadian System The…
The latest Carnival of Personal Finance is up
The 120th edition of the Carnival of Personal Finance is up at My Retirement Blog. Included in this edition of the carnival is my review of the classic book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.
Contracting for Government Services
Local governments provide a variety of services which are highly valued by their residents. From police protection to waste disposal, from snow plowing to utility meter reading, the local government is charged with providing the infrastructure necessary for a smooth functioning economy and a high level quality of life. But should local governments outsource these…
Legislating Medical Care
A press release from Senator Ron Wyden sent to me at 7am this morning states the following: Working to enhance screening and prevention of childhood type 2 diabetes, U.S Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) today announced that an amendment giving states $15 million to combat the disease has been included in the final conference version of…
A Random Walk
I just finished reading Burton Malkiel’s influential book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Originally published in 1973, the book was one of the first to advocate for the creation of a “no-load, minimum-management-fee mutual fund that simply buys the hundreds of stocks making up the broad stock-market averages and does no trading from security…
Public Health vs. Medicine
What are the major differences between medicine and public health? What challenges do public health officials frequently ignore? On Tuesday, I attended a seminar by Dr. Richard Schieber. Dr. Schieber was a practicing pediatrician, however for the last fifteen years he has worked as a medical epidemiologist for the CDC. One of the major challenges…