Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The paradigm of homo economicus–a perfectly rational, self-interested person–may have taken a hit based on the findings of a paper by Dwyer et al. (2023). The authors aim to examine how people spend windfall earnings using a randomized experiment. We took advantage of a rare opportunity to examine generosity among a diverse sample of adults…
That is the question a paper by Anirban Basu (2023) in Science Advances attempts to answer. A key assumption the article makes is that race is a social and not a biological construct. Basu justifies this assumption by stating that “the vast majority of genetic variation associated with race-specific traits exists within racial groups and…
A paper by Fabre and Straub (2023) examines how public-private partnerships (PPP) have worked in practice. Why would linking public and private provisions of goods and services be useful? One reason is that the public sector might have policy goals (e.g., providing health care to the poor), which the private sector may not provide in…
The answer depends on a number of factors. These include: (i) are there interactions between the entity and the environment, (ii) does the model have a time component, (iii) is the model a cohort or individual level model, (iv) is the model continuous or discrete states, and (v) is it Markovian or not. The Brennan…
No surprise, but it’s high. Chandra, Coile and Mommaerts (2023) write: The average cost of AD [Alzheimer’s Disease] drug development is estimated (based on a host of assumptions) to be $5.6 billion, largely due to high preclinical and phase 3 trial costs (Cummings, Reiber, and Kumar 2018). This number greatly exceeds R&D costs for other…
That is the title of an article by Cascaldi-Garcia et al. (2023) in the Journal of Economic Literature. I summarize some of the key findings below. Definitions: Risk: Applies to situations in which the outcome is unknown to decision makers, but the probability distribution governing the outcome is known” Volatility. Often used synonymously with risk,…
The American Economic Journal (AEJ) recently came out with its awards for best papers of the year. These are listed below along with their abstracts. AEJ: Applied Economics: “The Evolution of Work in the United States,” by Enghin Atalay, Phai Phongthiengtham, Sebastian Sotelo, and Daniel Tannenbaum 12(2), (pp. 1-34) April 2020 AEJ: Economic Policy: “Technology,…
Let’s say that you want to predict the impact of some policy intervention. Let us also assume that there is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) examining the impact of said policy on some outcome of interest. To predict the best model fit, at first glance, one would use all the data in the RCT to…
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among…
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus claimed that climate change is “the ultimate challenge for economics.” One could say that climate change poses a serious challenge for the health economist as well. Climate change could have negative impact on health across a variety of dimensions including: Increased pollution has negative impacts on respiratory diseaes The increased increased…