Public technology assessments in general and Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) in particular have been justified by offsetting benefits of improving patient health and reducing health care spending. However, little conceptual and empirical understanding exists concerning the quantitative...

Many countries have large future public liabilities attributable to health care programs. However, little explicit analysis exists about how health care policies affect these program liabilities. We analyze how reimbursement and approval policies affect public liabilities through their impact on...

This paper concerns inferring how self-interested subjects, as opposed to altruistic investigators, evaluate treatments in social experiments. The authors argue that the attrition behavior of subjects reveals their evaluation and discuss the usefulness of using such data in performing...

This paper investigates the degree to which the local prevalence of AIDS increases the demand for disease-preventing methods of contraception among young adults. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-1979), we find substantial evidence that the use of condoms was quite...

This paper investigates the degree to which the occurrence of vaccine-preventable diseases affects vaccination efforts against such diseases. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey on measles vaccinations in the United States between 1984 and 1990, the paper shows there is strong...

The production of data, and the functioning of the market for observations, are universal concerns to all fields of positive economics. Economists, however, have typically placed greater emphasis on systematically analyzing the consumption of data than on considering its production. In the...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the long-run growth in weight over time. We argue that technological change has induced weight growth by making home- and market-production more sedentary and by lowering food prices through agricultural innovation. We consider how...