In this essay I provide a wide-ranging overview of recent research linking medical treatments to productivity and ability to function. The studies that examine how do illness and medical treatments affect absenteeism, at-work productivity (“presenteeism”) and ability to function vary in the...

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has again become the focus of considerable controversy. In understanding the economics underlying this industry, distinctions between short, medium and long-run costs are critical, as is that between economic and accounting costs. Consumers' heterogeneous...

We investigate the theoretical possibility and empirical regularity of two troublesome anomalies that frequently arise when cross-price elasticities are estimated for a set of brands expected to be substitutes. These anomalies are the occurrence of: (a) negatively signed cross-elasticities; and...

Although broad trends in medical spending in the U.S. over the last decade have received widespread attention from policymakers, very little attention has focused on the components of those changes. For many other industries, economists typically divide nominal expenditures by an official...