Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Nobel Prize in Economics (formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer. For Romer, the Nobel Prize committee cited his work on endogenous growth theory, that models “how economic decisions and market conditions determine the creation of new technologies. Paul Romer solved…
The winners are James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for research to treat cancer using the body’s own immune system. The Nobel Prize officially was “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” The Wall Street Journal reports: The work of Drs. Allison and Honjo formed the backbone of new generations…
Hank Stern of InsureBlog hosts this week’s “Pink edition” Health Wonk Review. Check it out. Also of note this week is that Richard Thaler has the 2017 Nobel prize in economics. For more on Dr. Thaler’s work, check out the Nobel Prize website.
Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, Michael W. Young. The three Nobel prize winners received their prize for their work understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm. As summarized in the Nobel prize announcement: Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year’s Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm.…
Yoshinori Ohsumi. He won the award for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. What is autophagy? The Nobel Prize website explains: The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto-, meaning “self”, and phagein, meaning “to eat”. Thus,autophagy denotes “self eating”. This concept emerged during the 1960’s, when researchers first observed that the cell could…
…Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their research on contract theory. One of my favorite papers in all of economics is Holmstrom and Milgrom’s 1991 paper titled “Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design.” In a world where health care is increasingly moving to value-based payment, payers (i.e., insurance companies, employers, and the government) are increasingly…
The Nobel prize for medicine honored breakthroughs in understanding how key substances are moved around within a cell. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and signaling molecules called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. That process happens through…
When cells become specialized cells (e.g., blood cells, bone cells, sex cells), are these cells fixed and immutable? In the past, researchers though the answer was yes. It turns out, that cells can draw on their DNA to become amazingly flexible. This breakthrough is due in large part for this year’s Nobel Prize winners, Sir…
Two months ago I was standing in Stockholm’s Stadshuset (City Hall). Soon, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims will be there as well. The pair, however, will be accepting the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics. Although I am not a macroeconomist myself, Marginal Revolution has a good description of the pair. Thomas Sargent. Christopher Sims. My…
Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen, and Christopher A. Pissarides. From the Nobel press release: On many markets, buyers and sellers do not always make contact with one another immediately. This concerns, for example, employers who are looking for employees and workers who are trying to find jobs. Since the search process requires time and…