Dynamic effects of health and inter-state and inter-industry knowledge spillovers, total factor productivity (TFP) growth and convergence in U.S. agriculture are examined using recently developed procedures for panel data and a growth accounting model. Strong evidence is found to support the...

Efficiency measurement has been one of the most extensively explored areas of health services research over the past two decades. Despite this attention, few studies have examined whether a provider’s efficiency varies on a monthly, quarterly or other, sub-annual basis. This paper presents an...

An extensive literature relating patients’ expectations to treatment outcomes has not addressed the determinants of these expectations. We argue that treatment history is part of a reference point that influences patients’ expectations of how effective further treatment might be, thus...

The goals of the present study were to demonstrate a method for examining selection bias in large-scale implementations of community-based family skills programs, and to explore the nature of selection bias in one such implementation. We used evaluation data from a statewide dissemination of a...

Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (IIH; pseudotumor cerebri) is a disorder with a reported incidence rate of one to three per 100,000 people in the general population. The rate among obese females of childbearing age is approximately 20 out of every 100,000 (1,9,17,25). As its name suggests,...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is among the most popular empirical tools for measuring cost and productive efficiency. Because DEA is a linear programming technique, establishing formal statistical properties for outcomes is difficult. We show that the incidence of inefficiency within a...

This paper studies how the change from retrospective cost-based reimbursement to a prospective payment system shifted hospital investment strategies from quality-enhancing technologies to cost-saving technologies. A consequence of this change was the opportunity for for-profit hospitals to...

Conceptual modeling and empirical analysis of individuals’ sequential self-selection of adherence to voluntary treatment or education programs is an ongoing and unsettled area of inquiry. Both the representation of the decision process and the implementation of econometric methods for...

When a binary dependant variable is misclassified probit and logit estimates are biased and inconsistent. In this paper we suggest a conceptual basis for endogenous misclassification of the dependant variable due to systematic respondent bias and the use of Likert scales commonly used in...

In four Southern African countries where the HIV prevalence rate is among the highest in the world, 46% of female and 68% of male adolescents infected with HIV report having never engaged in sex. This finding indicates either the dominance of non-sexual modes of HIV transmission or systematic...