Featured Articles

  • Medical Scribes as a Health Care Input
    By Andrew Friedson Physician extenders such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants have long been studied as a potential source of efficiency gains in health care production. These efficiency gains come from allowing the health care workforce to specialize tasks based on differing levels of human capital, enabling practice “at the top of one’s license.” More ...
  • Opioid Prescribing Differences by Medical School Rank
    Opioid prescribing differences by medical school rank By Molly Schnell and Janet Currie The United States is in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in its history, with over 115 Americans dying every day from a drug overdose involving an opioid (CDC WONDER, 2017). While deaths involving heroin and illicit fentanyl account for a growing number ...
  • Information Technology and Patient Health: Analyzing Outcomes, Populations, and Mechanisms
    by Seth Freedman, Haizhen Lin, & Jeffrey Prince Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have become a widespread input throughout the healthcare delivery system. At the outset of this diffusion there was substantial optimism that these tools would lead to improvements in productivity, costs, and quality. This optimism was instrumental in the passage of the Health Information Technology ...
  • Child Development: Research and Policy
    Child Development: Research and Policy by Hannes Schwandt and Valentine Duque The economic literature on child development, emerging over the last 20 years, has made two important contributions to the study of human inequality: (1) Child development is a major determinant of individual’s life-long health and productivity and (2), particularly important are the in-utero period (the so called ...
  • In Utero Sunlight, Vitamin D, and Asthma
    Second Trimester Sunlight and Asthma: Evidence from Two Independent Studies by Nils Wernerfelt, David J. G. Slusky and Richard Zeckhauser Asthma prevalence in the United States has been rising for the past few decades, nearly doubling from 1980-1995 and affecting close to 25 million Americans today (NHIS).  What can explain this dramatic increase?  The answer is crucial to understand as ...
  • AJHE NewsBrief: Have Cigarette Taxes Lost their Bite? New Estimates of the Relationship between Cigarette Taxes and Youth Smoking
    Benjamin Hansen, University of Oregon, IZA and NBER Daniel I. Rees, University of Colorado Denver and IZA Joseph J. Sabia, University of New Hampshire and IZA American Journal of Health Economics 3(1): 60–75, 2017 Since the late 1990s, the youth smoking participation rate has fallen dramatically, and is now at record-low levels.  According to Youth Risky Behavior Survey (YRBS) ...
  • Directions in the Economics of Smoking
    Philip DeCicca, Ball State University Donald Kenkel, Cornell University Michael Lovenheim, Cornell University Erik Nesson, Ball State University Smoking prevention has been a key component of health policy in the United States since the Surgeon General’s report roughly half of a century ago. Public policies intended to reduce the harm from smoking include cigarette taxation, place-specific smoking bans, ...
  • Electronic Cigarettes: Open Questions in an Evolving Market
    Abigail S. Friedman Department of Health Policy and Management Yale School of Public Health Electronic cigarettes entered the U.S. market ten years ago, yet the consequences of this entry remain hotly debated today. Are e-cigarettes a disruptive technology that will reduce use of traditional tobacco products, or a new way to foment addiction that will increase costly tobacco ...
  • AJHE NewsBrief: Risk Beliefs and Preferences for E-Cigarettes
    W. Kip Viscusi Vanderbilt University American Journal of Health Economics 2(2): 13-240, 2016 The emergence of electronic cigarettes, known as e-cigarettes, has generated regulatory interest throughout the world. Should regulatory policies encourage use of e-cigarettes or discourage their use? What role, if any, do warnings have to play? Compared to conventional cigarettes, e-cigarettes are several orders of magnitude ...
  • No Shortage of Data: A Health Economist at the U.S. Census Bureau
    Victoria Udalova U.S. Census Bureau Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2015, after completing my Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I started my career as a health economist at the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau collects data on a wide ...