The landmark Waxman-Hatch Act of 1984 represented a "grand compromise" legislation that sought to balance incentives for innovation by establishing finite periods of market exclusivity yet simultaneously providing access to lower cost generics expeditiously following patent expiration. Here we...

The pricing of medical products and services in the U.S. is notoriously complex. In health care, supply prices (those received by the manufacturer) are distinct from demand prices (those paid by the patient) due to health insurance. The insurer, in designing the benefit, decides what prices...

Although US health care expenditures reached 17.6 percent of GDP in 2009, quality measurement in this important service sector remains limited. Studying quality changes associated with 11 years of health care for patients with diabetes, we find that the value of reduced mortality and avoided...

<DIV><DIV><DIV><P>The celebrated economist Zvi Griliches’s entire career can be viewed as an attempt to advance the cause of accuracy in economic measurement. His interest in the causes and consequences of technical progress led to his pathbreaking work on price hedonics, now the principal analytical technique...</p></div></div></div>

<DIV><DIV><P>This volume contains papers presented at a conference in May 1988 in Washington, D.C., commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW). The call for papers emphasized assessments of broad topics in economic measurement, both...</p></div></div>

<DIV>With the United States and other developed nations spending as much as 14 percent of their GDP on medical care, economists and policy analysts are asking what these countries are getting in return. Yet it remains frustrating and difficult to measure the productivity of the medical care service...</div>

In 2011, Bristol-Myers Squibb set the price of its newly approved melanoma drug ipilimumab—brand name Yervoy—at $120,000 for a course of therapy. The drug was associated with an incremental increase in life expectancy of four months. Drugs like ipilimumab have fueled the perception that the...

Drugs like bevacizumab ($50,000 per treatment episode) and ipilimumab ($120,000 per episode) have fueled the perception that the launch prices of anticancer drugs are increasing over time. Using an original dataset of 58 anticancer drugs approved between 1995 and 2013, we find that launch...