Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The term “Carer QALY” was coined in a paper by Mott et al. (2023) and is identified as the case where “it is possible for an effective treatment that provides survival gains (with relatively little or no QOL gain) to appear less effective than the comparators when carer QOL is considered.” While the term “Carer…
…well, real interest at least. While in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic have seen nominal interest rates rising, in the long run real (i.e., inflation adjusted) interest rates are falling. A NBER working paper by Obstfeld (2023) provides compelling evidence of this trend. Current real interest rates are likely somewhere in the 1%-2% range.…
From a Lex Fridman interview with theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. “Stocks may not achieve a precise value until they’re traded, but that doesn’t mean we can’t approximate their worth until they change hands. Similarly, electrons might not have definite properties, but they do exist. It’s true that the electron doesn’t exist as a classical object…
An interesting paper by Cooper and Kegel (2023) in AEJ: Microeconomics finds that using teams (rather then individuals) in the prisoner’s dilemma game is more likely to result in choosing to cooperate than would be the case if individuals playing each other. We compare behavior of two person teams with individuals in indefinitely repeated prisoner…
Let’s say you want to measure the relationship between multiple variables. One of the easiest ways to do this is with a linear regression (e.g., ordinary least squares). However, this methodology assumes that the relationship between all variables is linear. One could also use generalized linear models (GLM) in which variables are transformed, but again…
That is the question posed by a paper by Wang, Sreedhara and Schneeweiss (2022). The authors replicate the findings from n=250 real-world data studies. The studies were replicated using 3 datasets: (i) Optum Clinformatics claims data, (ii) IBM MarketScan Research Database claims data, Medicare fee-for-service claims data, and (iii) CPRD electronic health records. Key paper…
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…