Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many researchers complain that physicians often use treatments with little evidence to base these decisions. From off-label prescribing, to unstudied surgical procedures, physicians are often painted as cavalier practitioners who don’t read studies. For instance, Austin Frakt at Incidental Economist writes: The British Medical Journal sifted through the evidence for thousands of medical treatments to assess…
Many people talk of countries with net exports as having a good economy and those with net imports as having a less robust economy. However, an interesting book Why Information Grows by César Hidalgo talks about a more important feature being the imagination balance of goods and services exported. One example of a balance of…
Maybe so according to Arnold Kling’s askblog, who argues that annuities are not very helpful for many people. Economists think that old people who do not annuitize their wealth are dumb. I decided a long time ago that it is the economists who are dumb. Old people face many risks other than the risk of…
Stand-up economist Yoram Bauman, weighs on how AI will affect to productivity of jokes. Enjoy.
Earlier this year, I reviewed one definition of causality: the Bradford Hill criteria. Now I move from a medical definition causality to one developed by an economist (in fact, an economist from my alma matter). Granger causality basically identifies a variable as causal if: (i) it occurs the outcome of interest and (ii) including past…
Let’s say we are interested in determining whether a particular treatment improves quality of life. Common measures of quality of life include EQ-5D, SF-12, and SF-36, among others. However, a systematic review of 237 randomized controlled trials found that only 43% collected SF-12 or SF-36 measures. If you are measuring a treatment’s effect on quality…
How have discrete choice experiments changed over time? This is the question Soekhai et al. (2018) try to answer. They conduct a systematic literature review covering 27 years of data. Below I summarize some of their findings graphically. First, you see a trend of an increasing number of DCEs. We also see that whereas DCEs…
As explained by Tyler Cowen: Hope everyone has a good weekend.
I ask this question in economic terms. Luxury goods are defined as goods that increase as a share of a person’s (or country’s) budget as income increases; necessity goods are defined as goods that decrease as a share of a person’s (or country’s) budget as income increases. There is actually mixed evidence on the topic…
QuantEcon is an interesting site from some high profile economists advocating for open-source tools for quantitative economic analysis. The organization describes itself on their website as follows: QuantEcon is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving economic modeling by enhancing computational tools for economists. Our activities include developing and facilitating the development of open source software…