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El Universal reports that Mexican police have arrested 13 individuals accused of selling surgical masks on the street.  Should the government arrest individuals selling surgical masks? Any capitalist would in general support the ability of individuals to trade cash for the goods they desire.  However, the case of the surgical mask may be different.  Surgical…

Where has the swine flu been detected?   A map of the H1N1 Swine Flu lists all confirmed, unconfirmed, and negative cases of the swine flu around the world. Mexico City has decided to close all restaurants in the capital, only allowing them to serve food ‘to go.’    Restaurant associations are asking for the restaurant ban to be lifted.…

What caused the housing boom?  Did people really believe that a median home price of over $500,000 in San Diego  were realistic?  Were people caught up in the dot-com boom really rational?  Economics 2.0, reviews a paper saying that rational people will often buy assets that they themselves believe are overvalued.  Why? Let’s say I believe that…

Experiment: Airlift 50,000 Yemini Jews to Israel and randomly place them with Israeli families. Finding: Nuture matters.  “We find that children who were placed in a good environment (a home with good sanitary conditions, in a city, and outside of an ethnic enclave) were more likely to achieve positive long-term outcomes. They were more likely to…

I recently read an interesting book titled Economics 2.0.  The book has a Freakonomics pedigree, but reads more like a newspaper or a blog. The benefit of this format is that the authors are able to review a wide variety of economic studies. The downside is there isn’t any real thesis. The book is basically just: “here…

This week my paper on Pharmacists as vaccinators was accepted for publication by the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Benefits.  Co-authored with John Fontanesi, Jan Hirsch, Sarah Lorentz, and Debra Bowers, “Comparison of Pharmacists and Primary Care Providers as Immunizers” examines whether pharmacists are productive and efficient vaccinators.  The abstract of the paper is below.  The…

The Second Anniversary edition of the Cavalcade of Risk has been posted at the always informative InsureBlog. Two especially interesting posts from Cato-at-Liberty and Colorado Health Insurance Insider discuss the individual–compared to the group–health insurance market.

This post will review Han Bleichrodt‘s lecture regarding the micro foundations of using QALY based utility functions. QALYs Many health economists use a QALY model to describe a person’s preference over health states. For instance let (q1,…qτ) be an individuals health profile from year 1 to year τ. The QALY model assumes that utility is…

Below is a summary of Don Kenkel‘s lecture regarding the Economics of Substance Abuse Use. General The World Health Organization and the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) have statistics on the number of drug users around the world. They claim that in 2002 there were 2 billion alcohol users, 1.3 billion smokers, and…

A week ago, we looked at Nichol’s 2003 paper regarding LAIV for healthy working adults. Today we will review the rest of the literature regarding the effectiveness and the economic impact of influenza vaccination for working-aged adults. The seminal work in the literature is written by Nichol and colleagues in the October 1995 edition of…