The celebrated economist Zvi Griliches’s entire career can be viewed as an attempt to advance the cause of accuracy in economic measurement. His interest in the causes and consequences of technical progress led to his pathbreaking work on price hedonics, now the principal analytical technique...

This volume contains papers presented at a conference in May 1988 in Washington, D.C., commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW). The call for papers emphasized assessments of broad topics in economic measurement, both...

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. The research in Measuring and Modeling Health...

Congress enacted and renewed the Prescription Drug User Fee Acts (PDUFA) in 1992, and renewed it in 1997 and 2002, mandating FDA performance goals in reviewing and acting on drug applications within specified time periods. In turn, the FDA was permitted to levy user fees on drug sponsors...

Economists have long suggested that to be reliable, a preferred medical care price index should employ time-varying weights to measure outcomes-adjusted changes in the price of treating an episode of illness. In this article, we report on several years of research developing alternative indexes...

Health accounts document changes over time in the level and composition of health spending. There has been a continued evolution in the ability to track such outlays. Less rapid has been the ability to interpret changes in spending. In this paper we apply quality adjusted price indexes for...

The release of clarified Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines and independent changes in consumer behavior provide an opportunity to study the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in the prescription drug market alongside the effects of various physician-oriented promotions....

The ratio of controller-to-reliever medication use has been proposed as a measure of treatment quality for asthma patients. In this study we examine the effects of plan-level mean out-of-pocket asthma medication patient copayments and other features of benefit plan design on the use of...