This paper examines trends in computer usage and the effect on productivity growth for a sample of federal government agencies over the period from 1987 to 1992. We link data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on the growth in real output per employee with data from a marketing research...

I examine the impact of pharmaceutical innovation, as measured by the vintage (world launch year) of prescription drugs used, on longevity using longitudinal, country-level data on 30 developing and high-income countries during the period 2000-2009. I control for fixed country and year effects,...

I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the age-adjusted mortality rate from the disease. The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer, i.e. cancer at different sites in the body...

We investigate the effect of the vintage (year of FDA approval) of the prescription drugs used by an individual on his or her survival and medical expenditure. When we only control for age, sex, and interview year, we estimate that a one-year increase in drug vintage increases life expectancy by...

This paper is a re-examination of the relationship between research and development (R&D) activity and total factor productivity (TFP) at the industry level during the period extending from the early 1960's to the mid-1970's. The data base consists of NSF data on applied R&D expenditures by...

There is substantial evidence from the literature on individual wage determination that length of service to the firm is an important determinant of earnings and thus of labor productivity, holding constant employee at-tributes such as age, sex, and education. Earnings growth associated with...

We attempt to make inferences about the elasticity of the government's demand for specific weapons by analyzing the statistical relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems, using data contained in the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Reports. The...

Importation of drugs into the U.S. would result in a decline in U.S. drug prices. The purpose of this paper is to assess the consequences of importation for new drug development. A simple theoretical model of drug development suggests that the elasticity of innovation with respect to the...

This study examines the effect of changes in the vintage distribution of cardiovascular system drugs on hospitalization and mortality due to cardiovascular disease using longitudinal country-level data. The vintage of a drug is the first year in which it was marketed anywhere in the world. We...

We perform an econometric analysis of the effect of new drug launches on longevity, using data from the IMS Health Drug Launches database and the WHO Mortality Database. Our data cover virtually all of the diseases borne by people in 52 countries during the period 1982-2001, and enable us to...