The diffusion of health care technology is influenced by both the total market share of managed care organizations as well as the level of competition among them. This paper differentiates between HMO penetration and competition and examines their relationship to the adoption of cardiac...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

Current regulating policies are aimed at eliminating negative effect of market failures and at controlling macroeconomic stability, but they do not sufficiently facilitate long-term aims of human being. A method of soft economic regulation making use of endogenous nature of preferences is...

Patenting may speed up genetic research when small inventors face high research and development costs and also face large rivals that produce at declining marginal costs. Even with patents, however, small inventors may turn down socially beneficial projects when they believe that R&D spending...

Good health is a crucial part of well-being but spending on health can be justified on economic grounds. The goal of reducing poverty provides a different but equally powerful case for health investments. However, if policymakers are to accelerate the substantial health gains of recent decades,...

[Forthcoming in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity] We analyse the major economic issues raised by the 1997 Tobacco Resolution and the ensuing proposed legislation that were intended to settle tobacco litigation in the United States. By settling litigation largely in return for tax increases,...

Efforts to regionalize cardiac services can increase access costs for patients. This study is the first to quantify this trade off by estimating a demand model for surgery services that is used simulate the effect of centralization of cardiac services on hospital and treatment choices. The model...

Efforts to regionalize cardiac services can increase access costs for patients. This study quantifies this trade off by estimating the effects of changes in the regulation of hospital services on treatments and outcomes. A demand model for surgery services is specified in which heart attack...

In 1975, Guam stopped testing food workers for foodborne disease. Instead, it taught them how to avoid spreading disease to restaurant patrons. But this new policy did not much cut the rate of foodborne disease among patrons, suggests a statistical study. A major typhoon may have cut the disease...

Two types of legislation underlie cadaveric organ donations: presumed consent (PC) and informed consent (IC). In informed consent countries, people are only donors when deceased if they registered to do so while alive. Conversely, in presumed consent countries, anybody is a potential donor when...