Economists have long been ambivalent about whether the discipline should focus on the analysis of markets or should be concerned with social interactions more generally. Recently the discipline has sought to broaden its scope while maintaining the rigor of modern economic analysis. Major...

Perceived shortcomings in the quality of American education at the elementary and secondary school levels have drawn much public attention recently. In particular, concern with the composition of the teacher force has been prominent. Informed assessment of the various proposals for increasing...

Statisticians have proposed meta-analysis to combine the findings of multiple studies of health risks or treatment response. The standard practice is to compute a weighted-average of the estimates. Yet it is not clear how to interpret a weighted average of estimates reported in disparate...

In the early 1940s, Haavelmo proposed a probabilistic structure for econometric modeling, aiming to make econometrics useful for public decision making. His fundamental contribution has become thoroughly embedded in subsequent econometric research, yet it could not fully answer all the deep...

Forthright characterization of scientific uncertainty is important in principle and serves important practical purposes. Nevertheless, economists and other researchers commonly report findings with incredible certitude, reporting point predictions and estimates. To motivate expression of...

COVID-19 antibody tests have imperfect accuracy. There has been lack of clarity on the meaning of reported rates of false positives and false negatives. For risk assessment and clinical decision making, the rates of interest are the positive and negative predictive values of a test. Positive...

Vaccination against infectious disease may be beneficial to reduce illness in vaccinated persons and disease transmission across the population. The welfare-economic practice of specifying a social welfare function and considering a planner who seeks to optimize welfare provides a constructive...

This paper discusses how limited ability to assess patient risk of illness and predict treatment response may affect the welfare achieved by adherence to clinical practice guidelines and by decentralized clinical practice. I explain why predictive ability has been limited, calling attention to...

This paper extends my research applying statistical decision theory to treatment choice with sample data, using maximum regret to evaluate the performance of treatment rules. The specific new contribution is to study as-if optimization using estimates of illness probabilities in clinical choice...

Analyses of public policy regularly express certitude about the consequences of alternative policy choices. Yet policy predictions often are fragile, with conclusions resting on critical unsupported assumptions. Then the certitude of policy analysis is not credible. This paper develops a...