The question of whether morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death has been at the center of health debates in the United States for some time. Compression of morbidity would lead to longer life but less rapid medical spending increases than if life extension were...

Disease‐based medical care expenditure indexes are currently of interest to measurement economists and have been the subject of several recent papers. These papers, however, produced widely different results for medical care inflation and also varied in the datasets and methods used, making...

Many national accounts of economic output and prosperity, such as gross domestic product (GDP) or net domestic product (NDP), offer an incomplete picture by ignoring, for example, the value of leisure, home production, and the value of health. Previous discussed shortcomings of such accounts...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will dramatically alter health insurance markets and the sources through which individuals obtain coverage. As the ACA is implemented, it is essential to monitor the intended and the unintended consequences of these regulations. To evaluate the changes in health...

Financial incentives have been shown to have strong positive short‐run effects for problematic health behaviors, but the effects often disappear once incentive programs end. This paper analyzes the results of a large‐scale workplace field experiment to examine whether self‐funded...

We examine six molecules facing initial loss of US exclusivity (LOE, from patent expiration or challenges) between June 2009 and May 2013 that were among the 50 most prescribed molecules in May 2013. We examine prices per day of therapy (from the perspective of average revenue received by retail...

This paper exploits a sharp reduction in patient cost sharing at age 70 in Japan, using a regression discontinuity design to examine its effect on utilization, health, and financial risk arising from out-of-pocket expenditures. Due to the national policy, cost sharing is 60-80 percent lower at...

This paper studies the effects that pharmaceutical expenditure and other medical non-durables has on health out¬comes, such as mortality and life expectancy. Some recent research is focused on the study of public expenditure in health and the correlation with positive health indicators, and...

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's death on 5 December 2013 and his funeral ten days later were taken as an occasion in the global media to discuss the merits of political leadership for human security, with occasional comments on its pitfalls. This particular leader is not the most politically safe...

While security of our<em> </em>hominid<em> </em>encampments and settlements must have been at or near the top of our species priorities since our evolution some several hundred thousand years ago, awareness of the magnitude of our alterations, interactions and impacts on our world is a very recent event. Even...