Much of the property damage from wildfires occurs when fires spread into built up areas, the wildland urban interface. Fire spread within such areas occurs from house to house, as embers from one burning structure ignite neighboring ones. Actions can be taken to mitigate the chances that a given...

In his Labor Day address, President Biden stated that the U.S. "has the highest drug prices in the world, and there is no reason for it." For new branded drugs, the first part of that statement is supported by a recent RAND Report (Mulcahy et. al. 2021) which found U.S. average prices are 2.3...

The conventional model for the use of cost effectiveness analysis for health programs involves determining whether the cost per unit of effectiveness of the program is better than some socially determined maximum acceptable cost per unit of effectiveness. If a program is better, the policy...

This paper describes current pattern of insurance coverage for precision medicines and, especially, companion diagnostics and explores what coverage would improve efficiency. We find that currently coverage is common for tests and treatments with clinical acceptance used at high volumes but is...

Although the role of the services sector in the economy has grown increasingly large, and partnerships are a prevalent form of organization in this sector, relatively little is known about the behavior and performance of these firms. In this paper an attempt is made to fill that gap by...

The purpose of this paper is to present estimates of production functions for hospitals in which a measure of the level of physician input is utilized. Since no data on the total number of hours worked by non-salaried physicians is available for a large sample of U.S. hospitals, alternative...

Research has shown that higher cost-sharing lowers health care spending levels but less is known about whether cost-sharing also affects spending growth. From 2002 to 2016, private insurance deductibles more than tripled in magnitude. We use data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid...

Do consumers show a strong bias toward low deductible insurance plans, as many field studies imply? This paper reports on a controlled experiment intended to see whether subjects have a predisposition toward such plans and whether that preference is consistent when their default plan and...

The growth of health care spending has been a longstanding policy concern. Over the years, several innovations have been proposed to lower levels of health care spending; however, their impact has been limited and not sustained over time. Costly new technology, while often an improvement to...

In many developing countries the proportion of health care spending paid out of pocket is about half of all spending or more. This study examines the distribution of such spending by income and care type, and the variation in spending about its expected value, in order to see whether voluntary...