The nation's spending for prescription drugs has grown dramatically in recent years. Previous studies have shown that the replacement of older drugs by newer, more expensive, drugs is the single most important reason for this increase, but they did not measure how much of the difference between...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% G from 69.7 to 76.5 years G and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. While life expectancy has tended to increase, there...

Previous literature finds that larger downstream markets fuel the innovation of new technologies by incentivizing firms to spend more on R&D. Our evidence shows that larger markets also increase the extent of licensing-based cooperation between upstream innovators and downstream commercializers....

This paper contributes to the policy discussion on COVID-19 by presenting real-time evidence on the magnitude of the shock for Italian firms. We take advantage of unique panel data on 7,800 companies between January 2020 – right before the pandemic – and March of the same year – in the...

Maternal and newborn health in rural America suffers from a lack of obstetrical care, which is currently at crisis levels. Many state-level public policies have exacerbated or even initiated barriers to quality and access in rural healthcare. Such policies include certificate-of-need (CON) laws,...

The Healthcare Openness and Access Project (HOAP) is a collection of state-by-state comparative data on the flexibility and discretion that US patients and providers have in seeking and delivering healthcare. HOAP combines these data to produce 41 indicators of openness and accessibility. In...

The nation's spending for prescription drugs has grown dramatically in recent years. Previous studies have shown that the replacement of older drugs by newer, more expensive, drugs is the single most important reason for this increase, but they did not measure how much of the difference between...

This paper explores how the regulatory approval process affects innovation incentives in medical technologies. Prior studies have found early mover regulatory advantages for drugs. I find the opposite for medical devices, where pioneer entrants spend 34 percent (7.2 months) longer than follow-on...

US government investments in health information technology (IT) reflect the significant promise of digitization for improving quality and efficiency in health care. Previous studies of the impact of health IT have focused on the hospital setting, despite the fact that most care is delivered in...

Section I of this chapter briefly reviews the literature on medical spending, which suggests that health expenditures began small but steadily increased throughout history (from 1 percent to 4 percent of GDP), then began to increase rapidly among wealthier developed countries after 1950. Section...