Despite spending far more on medical care, Americans live shorter lives than the citizens of other high-income countries. The situation has been getting worse for at least three decades. This paper describes the main scientific methods for guiding the allocation of resources to health -...

In this article, we propose a new approach to estimating health-care demand. The aim of this paper is to determine the production costs of health care from the demand function of care. To do this, we used an approach based on structural equations where consumption and demand are estimated to...

We study the effects of a labor-intensive health care sector within an R&D-driven growth model with overlapping generations. Health care increases longevity and labor participation/productivity. We examine under which conditions expanding health care enhances growth and welfare. Even if the...

The standard literature on the value of life relies on Yaari’s (1965) model, which includes an implicit assumption of risk neutrality with respect to life duration. To overpass this limitation, we extend the theory to a simple variety of preferences which are not necessarily additively...

This paper argues for an alternative methodology to estimate the value of risk to life. By relaxing the assumption of additive separability, we introduce risk aversion with respect to the length of life and show that the extended model better fits available data. This is crucial for the...

Environmental, health, and safety advocates, say Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore, have been wrongly hostile to cost-benefit analysis because of a false belief that it is biased against regulation. The bias against regulation, while real, has been the artifact of historical accident - the...

Economic evaluation of projects involving changes in mortality risk conventionally assumes that lives are statistical, i.e., that risks and policy-induced changes in risk are small and similar among a population. In reality, baseline mortality risks and policy-induced changes in risk often...

Federal health and safety regulations have saved or improved the lives of thousands of Americans, but protecting our citizens from risk entails significant costs. In a world of limited resources, we must spend our regulatory dollars responsibly in order to do the most we can with the money we...

This paper argues for an alternative methodology to estimate the value of risk to life. By relaxing the assumption of additive separability, we introduce risk aversion with respect to the length of life and show that the extended model better fits available data. This is crucial for the...

The paper studies the incentive for providers to invest in new health care technologies under alternative payment systems, when the patients' benefits are uncertain. If the reimbursement by the purchaser includes both a variable (per patient) and a lump-sum component, efficiency can be ensured...