A patent only protects an innovator from others producing the same product, but it does not protect him from others producing better products under new patents. Therefore, one may divide up the source of competition facing an innovator into within-patent competition, which results from...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

This paper analyzes how markets for old-age care respond to the aging of populations. We consider how the biological forces, which govern the stocks of frail and healthy persons in a population, interacct with economic forces, which govern the demand and suppoly for labor-intensive care. Many...

Although the not-for-profit sector contributes greatly to aggregate output in many industries, there is little explicit analysis of the consequences of applying antitrust policy in this sector. This paper argues that the same incentives to collude exist in the non-profit sector as in the...

Given the rapid growth in health care spending that is often attributed to technological change, many private and public institutions are grappling with how to best assess and adopt new health care technologies. The leading technology adoption criteria proposed in theory and used in practice...

This paper discusses the definition and identification of external treatment effects and experimental designs capable of detecting these effects. External effects occur when the outcome of a given individual is affected by the treatment assignments of other individuals. The paper argues that...

The future course of old-age mortality is of great importance to public sector expenditures in countries where old-age programs account for large fractions of the public budget. This paper argues that the competitive market prices of mortality contingent claims, such as annuities and life...

This paper analyzes the savings and health care impacts of mortality contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life-insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life-insurance...

A common view in public finance is that there is an efficiency-redistribution tradeoff in which distortions are tolerated in order to redistribute income. However, the fact that so much public- and private redistributive activity involves in-kind transfers rather than cash may be indicative of...

This paper analyzes the factors contributing to the worldwide long-run rise in obesity and the effects of public interventions on its continued growth. The growth of obesity in a population results from an increase in calorie consumption relative to physical activity. Yet in developed countries,...