Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Queuing models were developed by Agner Erlang in 1904 to help determine the capacity needed for the Dutch telephone system. Since health care systems often have to deal with capacity constrains and plan for unforeseen surges in demand, queuing theory provides a useful approach for many health care research questions. Also, these models are typically…
According to a working paper by Greenstone and Nigam (2020), the answer is a resounding yes! …we project that moderate social distancing would save 1.7 million lives between March 1 and October 1, with 630,000 due to avoided overwhelming of hospital intensive care units. Using the projected age-specific reductions in death and age-varying estimates of…
MIT Technology Review has an interesting profile of Amy Finkelstein, an MIT professor and one of my favorite health economists. [Full disclosure: I’ve never met Amy Finkelstein, I just enjoy her research]. The article is interesting throughout, but below I excerpt a sidebar showing 8 things that we know about health economics due to Finkelstein’s…
Let’s say you have a new health care treatment. How much is someone willing to pay for it? One way to find out is with a first price sealed-bid auction. In this type of auction, you ask people how much they pay and if they have the highest bid, they get the item. In this…
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
The Economist has an interesting series of article (here and here) on covid-19, the new WHO name of the corona virus. One key issue is how strict containment efforts should be. These decisions are being made not just based on the potential to impact the health of a country’s population but also economic and political…
In many cities–particularly urban areas on the coasts–rent and home prices are much higher than in other areas. Many politicians talk about a housing crisis. Famously, Jimmy McMillan ran for office multiple times under “The Rent is too Damn High” Party. But why is the rent so high? Today I turn to a classic economics…
…Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. The announcement on the 2019 Economics award on the Nobel website: This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions – for example, the most effective interventions for…
Capitalism is imperfect. Yet is it the best system developed to allocate scarce resources across society. However, capitalism only works if people are moral beings. For instance, if you sell a treatment and promised benefits are never realized or–even worse–the treatment is harmful, this is a problem. Typical capitalistic responses to this issue are that:…
Hill (1996) offers a useful comment that model builders–particularly in the social sciences–should keep in mind. “A major defect of the classical view of hypothesis testing, […], is that it attempts to test only whether the model is true. This came out of the tradition in physics, where models such as Newtonian mechanics, the gas…