I investigate whether the types of cancer (breast, colon, lung, etc.) subject to greater penetration of new ideas had larger subsequent survival gains and mortality reductions, controlling for changing incidence. I use the MEDLINE/PubMED database, which contains more than 23 million references...

We estimate 2-way fixed-effects models of the rate of decline of the disease- and country-specific age-standardized YLL rate. The models control for the average decline in the YLL rate in each country and from each disease

The estimates indicate that cancer sites about which more research-supported articles were published since the 1970s had larger reductions in premature mortality and hospitalization during the period 1999-2013, controlling for the change in the number of people diagnosed. Cancer sites for which...

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,...

We analyze the effect of mergers on various aspects of airline performance during the period 1970-84, using a panel data set constructed by Caves et al. Estimates derived from a simple "matched pairs" statistical model indicate that these mergers were associated with reductions in unit cost. The...

Does using prescription drugs off-label increase disability and medical expenditure? This paper uses a unique dataset to evaluate off-label vs. on-label drug use in the US non-institutionalized population. Patients using drugs off-label have on average $515 higher medical expenditure and...

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...

We update and extend our previous study of the effect of drug age -- years since FDA approval -- on total medical expenditure, in several respects. The estimates indicate that, in the entire population, a reduction in the age of drugs utilized reduces non-drug expenditure 7.2 times as much as it...

Using micro data on virtually all of the drugs and diseases of over 500,000 people enrolled in Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, we examine the impact of the vintage (original FDA approval year) of drugs used to treat a patient on the patient's 3-year probability of survival, controlling for...

Only about one third of the approximately 80 drugs currently used to treat cancer had been approved when the war on cancer was declared in 1971. We assess the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to the increase in cancer survival rates in a differences in differences' framework, by...