Mid-week Links

The Healthcare Economist is on hiatus for a week of vacation.  Enjoy these links to tide you over until the next post next week. Income elasticity for hospitals: quantity vs. quality Recessions and the demand for mental health drugs? Do smoking bans increase or decrease fires? Abuse in a hospital? Prescribing drugs not approved by…

Fixed vs. Random Effects in Meta-Analyses

What does fixed effects and random effects mean? For economists, fixed effects means The fixed effects model is a linear regression of y on x, that adds to the speci cation a series of indicator variables.  For example, one could include a series of country dummies in comparative time series cross-sectional data to account for unexplained…

Effective Sample Size

Consider the case where you have observations on the IQ of six individuals.  Let say that three of the individuals are from California and three are from Florida.  Assume the following data structure: California: 90, 110, 130 Florida: 95, 100, 120 In this case, the mean IQ nationally is 107.5, the variance of the sample…

How does one measure the value of R&D?

Measuring the value of research and development (R&D) is a difficult problem.  Specifically, how does one measure the value of R&D on multifactor productivity (MFP).   At first glance, one would expect the value of R&D to be proportional to R&D spending in a given year.  However, this approach ignores that knowledge from previous years’ R&D…

7 Key P4P Research Questions

Why do physician practice patterns differ so much?  One cause of the regional variation the utilization of medical care is due to regional variation in patient health status.  Maynard, however, states that variation in patient health is not a primary cause of regional variation in the utilization of medical services.  He cites an article by…