Using micro data on virtually all of the drugs and diseases of over 500,000 people enrolled in Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, we examine the impact of the vintage (original FDA approval year) of drugs used to treat a patient on the patient's 3-year probability of survival, controlling for...

This paper develops a dynamic continuous-time model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its positive effect on expected consumption growth. The mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe, but...

I investigate the effect of large increases in the number of drugs available to treat rare diseases and HIV on mortality associated with them. Mortality from both diseases declined dramatically following increases in drug approvals. Before the Orphan Drug Act went into effect (between 1979 and...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% - from 69.7 to 76.5 years - and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. We investigate whether an aggregate health...

This paper examines the output contributions of capital and labor deployed in information systems (IS) at the firm level during the period 1988-91 throughout the business sector, using two different sources of data on these inputs. Our production function estimates suggest that there are...

This paper extends previous research on the effect of investment on labor productivity at the country level by accounting for investment in R&D, as well as for investment in fixed and human capital. Privately-funded R&D investment is found to have a significant positive effect on productivity....

With substantial fixed costs of drug development, more common conditions can support more products. If additional pharmaceutical products are beneficial, they will attract greater consumption and promote better health, e.g. greater longevity. We ask how market size measured by condition...

We hypothesize that pharmaceutical-embodied technical progress increases per capita output via its effect on labor supply (the employment rate and hours worked per employed person). We examine the effect of changes in both the average quantity and average vintage (FDA approval year) of drugs...

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...

The sensitivity of employment and real wages -- hence aggregate labor income to short-run fluctuations in output varies across countries. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that, if workers, but not capitalists, are liquidity constrained, the sensitivity of an economy to exogenous...