Data on health care expenditures, length of stay, utilization of health services, consumption of unhealthy commodities, etc. are typically characterized by: (a) nonnegative outcomes; (b) nontrivial fractions of zero outcomes in the population (and sample); and (c) positively-skewed distributions...

While many results from the treatment-effect and related literatures are familiar and have been applied productively in health economics evaluations, other potentially useful results from those literatures have had little influence on health economics practice. With the intent of demonstrating...

This paper proposes strategies for defining, identifying, and estimating features of treatment-effect distributions in contexts where multiple outcomes are of interest. After describing existing empirical approaches used in such settings, the paper develops a notion of treatment preference that...

Although individuals are all endowed with the same time budgets, time use patterns differ owing to heterogeneity in preferences and constraints. In today's health policy arena there is considerable discussion about how to improve health outcomes by increasing levels of physical activity. In this...

This paper suggests analytical strategies for obtaining informative parameter bounds when multivariate health-outcome data are partially observed in a particular yet common manner. One familiar context is where M1 health outcomes' respective totals across N1 time periods are observed but where...

The purposes of this paper are to describe some conceptual and empirical foundations of "healthy-time" measures of health outcomes or healthcare quality, and to explore how to expand the empirical opportunities for measuring such outcomes using U.S. national survey data. To these ends, the paper...

In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the development of statistical methods for the analysis of uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analysis, with a focus on situations in which the analyst has patient-level data on the costs and health effects of alternative interventions....

Comparing median outcomes to gauge treatment effectiveness is widespread practice in clinical and other investigations. While common, such difference-in-median characterizations of effectiveness are but one way to summarize how outcome distributions compare. This paper explores properties of...

In econometric risk-adjustment exercises, models estimated with one or more included endogenous explanatory variables ("risk adjusters") will generally result in biased predictions of outcomes of interest, e.g. unconditional mean healthcare expenditures. This paper shows that a first-order...

There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., OLS on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional...