In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

There have been many studies of the volume-outcome relationship. In all of these, the unit of analysis is the hospital or physician. However, this level of analysis is mostly limited to the use of in-hospital mortality rates and is particularly sensitive to selective referral. Moreover, the...

In the analysis of disability, when we don't control for the initial level of disability, we find that conditions with higher rates of lab and outpatient innovation had greater declines in the probability of missing work during 1996-2003. This suggests that the use of new laboratory procedures...

Estimates based on patient-level data indicate that therapeutic procedure innovation increased the life expectancy of WA hospital patients by almost 3 months between 2000 and 2007, controlling for the patient's age, sex, Diagnosis Related Group (DRG, over 600 categories), Aboriginal status,...