The Technological Change in Health Care Research Network collected unique patient-level data on three procedures for treatment of heart attack patients (catheterization, coronary artery bypass grafts and percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty) for 17 countries over a 15-year period to...

Vita brevis, ars longa (or: life is too short for abstracts)

Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) is a concept which has rapidly gained in popularity in health policy and considerable research resources are being allocated to the area. Proponents of DALYs suggest that the measure can be used both as a “GDP of health” and to help in setting...

From a beginning of small isolated settlements, the city-state (polis) emerged in Greece in the course of four centuries as a political, geographical and judicial unit, with an assembly, council, magistrates and written laws. Using a rational-actor perspective, it is shown how this process was...

In view of the rising proportion of elderly in the population, diffusion of medical technologies to the elderly is a particularly interesting phenomenon, with respect to both quality of life and health care costs. Using data on all carotid endarterectomies (CEAs) performed in Sweden, we explore...

A critical appraisal is made of an article in this journal by Dabelko and McCormick. In the article, the authors try to estimate the opportunity cost of defence. With simple tools from economic analysis it is shown that their methodological approach reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of this...