Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Suppose you have a single pill at your disposal and that pill will extend any person’s life by 10 years. You have to choose to give it to one of the following tow individuals: a 20‐year‐old patient, who will live for 10 more years if she gets the drug, and then she dies; a 70‐year‐old…
A paper by Daniotti et al. (2025) examines 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024). The authors trained neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in the GitHub code. As one can see below, nearly 1/3 of code in the US is being written by AI as of the end of 2024. US: 30.1% Germany: 24.3% France:…
That is the topic of a paper by Katherine Wagner (2022). The paper won the 2025 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy best papers award (despite being published 3 years ago). In her paper, Dr. Wagner uses data from 20 US Atlantic and Gulf Coast states between 2001 and 2017. Housing valuation data come from Zillow…
That is the title of a new USC white paper by Darren Filson, Karen Van Nuys, Darius Lakdawalla and Dana Goldman with the subtitle “How Much Does Revenue Drive New Drug Development?” What is the elasticity of innovation? It measures the percentage change in innovation—using the flow of new drugs approvals, or Phase 1, 2,…
This is the title of a recent paper by Jiao et al. (2025). Previous studies (e.g., Goldman et al. 2013, Goldman et al. 2023) have argued for a 3-part pricing model. Under a 3-part pricing model, drugs would come to market quickly under accelerated approval with a relatively lower price. As clinical trials and other…
Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are commonly used to evaluate the impact of new medical technologies on patient mortality and morbidity. However, use of QALYs Many authors have discussed the fact that standard assumptions result in utility functions that are unrealistically linear and separable, overlooking the diminishing marginal utility a fundamental property of utility functions in…
One reason are the administrative obstacles and frictions that eligible individuals have to overcome to receive the public services. A paper by Herd and Moynihan (2025) in the Journal of Economic Perspectives provides an overview of the literature. Such burdens are the experience of policy implementation as onerous, and arise via learning costs (knowing about…
In 2011, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded discoveries contributed $69 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) and supported seven million jobs. In 2020 alone, the US biomedical and pharmaceutical private sector generated more than $1.4 trillion in economic output. From Reece et al. (Health Affairs 2025) In addition to economic output, private-sector R&D…
That is what an analysis from PwC finds, at least with respect to stock market returns. Our PwC equal-weight index of 50 pharma companies analyzes the sector’s total shareholder returns performance relative to the S&P 500 Equal Weighted Index. From 2018 through November 2024, the PwC pharma index returned 7.6% to shareholders, compared with more…
Tyler Cowen is an economist from George Washington University and a libertarian. Thus, you would expect his answer to this question would be ‘always’. In a recent Bloomberg article discussing whether to privatize government assets (e.g., USPS), he makes a more nuanced argument. First, for consumer goods, it is nearly always good to privatize. Cowen…