Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Economists throughout recent history have created models in search of answering the following question: what is the optimal income tax structure? Optimal is generally defined by some social welfare function. While liberals generally favor progressive taxes over proportional or regressive taxes for ideological reasons, this paper makes an argument for progressive taxes by employing economic…
As an economist with libertarian leanings, last week was a great one to display the imperfection of government action. Below are some of the lowlights: Scooter Libby was convicted for leaking the identity of a CIA agent (Washington Post article). A Justice Department audit found that “the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out…
Today we will look at some common distributions used for Bayesian inference. Beta The first distribution we will look at is the Beta distribution. The beta distribution is equal to: [B(a,b)]-1πa-1(1-π)b-1. We can show that: If the prior ~ πa(1-π)b And likelihood ~ πS(1-π)F Then the posterior ~ πa+S(1-π)b+F Where ‘~’ denotes equal except for…
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Now we will give an example of Bayesian inference in a more complicating setting. This example is based on a problem from pp. 588-591 of Introductory Statistics for Business and Economics by Wonnacott and Wonnacott. Let us assume that there is a consumer electronics company named Banana, inc.. Banana sells iPood mp3 players. Banana, inc.,…
This week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Joe Paduda’s always informative Managed Care Matters website.
There was an interesting post on the Economist’s Free Exchange blog regarding the Health Insurance voucher debate (A veto for…). The post contains a critique of a healthcare voucher plan put forth by Ezekiel Emmanuel and Victor Fuchs in The New Republic. The pros and cons of the plan are certainly interesting but the blog’s…
Bayesian Inference is an important econometric tool. Over the next few days, we will review some of the basic Bayesian inference methods. Economicitis occurs in 300 out of every 100,000 adults. Recently, however, a test has been developed to screen for the disease. Of 1000 individuals with economicitis who were tested, only 40 had an…
Health savings accounts (HSAs) have been a major point of contention for health care reformers. Supporters claim that HSAs can reduce health care costs by decreasing the moral hazard problem inherent when third parties—such as insurance companies or the government—pay for medical services. Opponents claims that HSAs will attract rich and healthy individuals, leaving only…
If you are in graduate school, how do can you get your research published? A UC-San Diego Publishing Workshop website has some some advice regarding the best ways to publish your work in top journals. For economists, the two powerpoint presentations titled “Tips for navigating the road to publishing in graduate school” and “Top ten…