We investigate the effect of the vintage (year of FDA approval) of the prescription drugs used by an individual on his or her survival and medical expenditure. When we only control for age, sex, and interview year, we estimate that a one-year increase in drug vintage increases life expectancy by...

There is a large body of work that documents a strong, positive correlation between education and measures of health, but little is known about the mechanisms by which education might affect health. One possibility is that more educated individuals are more likely to adopt new medical...

We examine the impact of pharmaceutical innovation on the longevity of Australians during the period 1995-2003. Due to the government's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Australia has much better data on drug utilization than most other countries. We find that mean age at death increased more for...

We perform an econometric analysis of the effect of new drug launches on longevity, using data from the IMS Health Drug Launches database and the WHO Mortality Database. Our data cover virtually all of the diseases borne by people in 52 countries during the period 1982-2001, and enable us to...

We update and extend our previous study of the effect of drug age -- years since FDA approval -- on total medical expenditure, in several respects. The estimates indicate that, in the entire population, a reduction in the age of drugs utilized reduces non-drug expenditure 7.2 times as much as it...

We estimate the medical cost per life-year gained from increased utilization of HIV drugs by estimating the impact of increased drug utilization on the life expectancy and drug and hospital expenditure of HIV/AIDS patients, using aggregate (U.S. national-level) data for the period 1982-2001. We...

To American and European economists in 1945, the countries of Asia were unpromising candidates for high economic growth. In 1950 even the most prosperous of these countries had a per capita income less than 25 percent of that of the United States. Between the mid-1960s and the end of the...

We investigate the effect of therapeutic procedure innovation in general on the longevity of all hospital patients, i.e. patients with a variety of medical conditions. The analysis is based on data on over one million discharges from public and private hospitals in Western Australia (WA) during...

I examine the effect of pharmaceutical innovation on the functional status of nursing home residents using cross-sectional, patient-level data from the 2004 National Nursing Home Survey. This was the first public-use survey of nursing homes that contains detailed information about medication...