Children are therapeutic orphans and an underprivileged group in innovations derived from drug therapy. As the innovation process of pharmaceuticals is a long, risky and very costly business, economists typically emphasise lack of profit incentives and small market size as the most important...

Dieser Aufsatz stellt die entscheidungstheoretischen Grundlagen der Produktion von Gesundheitsleistungen dar und leitet daraus Schlussfolgerungen für die Gesundheitspolitik ab. Die bedeutendste Herausforderung am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts liegt darin, die Diffusion neuen medizinischen Wissens...

We use a calibrated stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and life expectancy over the period 1965-2005. We estimate that technological change along with the increase in the...

Dean Baker and Adriane Fugh-Berman have published a critique of a study I performed in 2007, entitled Why has longevity increased more in some states than in others?" One of the conclusions I drew from that study was that medical innovation accounts for a substantial portion of recent increases...

This study investigates the role of stratification of health and income in the social cost of healthrelated early retirement, as evidenced in the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP). We interpret early retirement as a mechanism to limit work-related declines in health that allows poorer and less...

This paper develops a simple analytical framework in which optimal health and retirement policies amid population aging can be discussed. To be efficient, these policies must recognize and exploit the dynamic complementarities between the timing of retirement, the size of lifecycle labour income...

This paper explores levels and trends in the prevalence of caesarean section delivery in Ireland between 1999 and 2006. Over this period the caesarean section rate in Ireland increased by almost one quarter. Using data from the Irish National Perinatal Reporting System we examine the...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the dynamics of networks in which new knowledge emerges and through which it is exchanged. Our conjecture is that the structure of a network cannot be divorced from the dynamics of the knowledge underpinning its activities. In so doing we look beyond...

This paper investigates the processes by which scientific knowledge is created and legitimized. It focuses on scientific developments in a branch of medicine and explores the pathways through which the growth of knowledge enables advances in medical science and in clinical practice. This work...

This paper investigates the factors that determine differences across OECD countries in health outcomes, using data on life expectancy at age 65, over the period 1960 to 2007. We estimate a production function where life expectancy depends on health and social spending, lifestyle variables, and...