All developed countries have been struggling with a trend toward health care absorbing an ever-larger fraction of government and private budgets. Adopting any treatment that improves health outcomes, no matter what the cost, can worsen allocative inefficiency by paying dearly for small health...

The social value of an innovation is comprised of the value to consumers and the value to innovators. We estimate that for the HIV/AIDS therapies that entered the market from the late 1980's onwards, innovators appropriated only 5% of the social surplus arising from these new technologies....

Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in justifying a system of medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on the relationship between medical liability forces on the one hand and medical errors and health care quality on the other. In this...

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...

Traditional economic analysis has proposed well known remedies to deal with consumption externalities and inefficient technological change in isolation, but lacks a general framework for addressing them jointly. We argue that the joint determination of Ramp;D and consumption externalities is...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. All developed countries have been struggling with a trend toward health care absorbing an ever-larger fraction of government and private...

A substantial literature has studied the influence of malpractice pressure on physician behavior. However, these studies generally focus on malpractice pressure stemming from state laws that govern liability exposure, which may be unknown or not salient to physicians. We test how physicians...

For decades, the US public and private sectors have committed substantial resources towards cancer research, but the societal payoff has not been well-understood. We quantify the value of recent gains in cancer survival, and analyze the distribution of value among various stakeholders. Between...

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...