Health economics, statistics, and health services research at the University of Warwick. Also like rock climbing and making noise on the guitar.
Empirical research into health and health related outcomes is characterised by a predominance of binary outcomes. One of the most popular outcomes (in a statistical sense) is mortality, for example. This type of outcome warrants its own type of model… Read More »To ‘y’ or not to ‘y’: Dichotomous outcomes and endogenous regressors
A recent post over at Ezra Klein’s excellent Wonkblog caught my attention, both for being a post about a health economics issue, but also due to comments users had posted below. The post is about a recent set of projections… Read More »Some comments on obesity
The aim of a health intervention is generally to cause a cost-effective increase to some normative outcome such as by reducing mortality, increasing productivity and so forth. Often policy makers want to encourage or discourage certain behaviours by using incentives… Read More »Cannabis and asbestos: The cost-effectiveness of prohibition as health policy
Endogeneity is everywhere. There is always a reason to assume that there is some endogeneity in a model; sometimes it can’t be totally eliminated and we must just reduce it to acceptable levels. Health economists produce research that often is… Read More »The curse of endogeneity in the clinical literature
Discussions of hospital organisation focus a lot on how particular services should be arranged in order to provide high quality care without sacrificing on equity. Many studies, looking at a wide range of different procedures, have identified a benefit from… Read More »Managed clinical networks
Why should we consider health equity? The rationale for treating health as a special good rests on the idea that a certain level of health is a precondition for achieving any of the other outcomes in life that we value.… Read More »The role of healthcare in promoting health equity
Now that the Health and Social Care Bill is the Health and Social Care Act, more focus will be placed on sources of information regarding provider performance. In order for patients to make informed choices about where they wish to… Read More »Making conclusions about provider quality
In the health economics literature we often treat a hospital as a healthcare producing ‘firm’. We define cost-functions and perform efficiency analysis, for example. However, this sort of analysis is certainly hampered by the difficulty in measuring healthcare production. One… Read More »Human capital, endogenous growth and hospital performance
Can we reasonably consider ‘doing nothing’ as an alternative course of action? In many cost-effectiveness analyses the intervention under consideration is compared against a ‘doing nothing’ scenario, although frequently the next best alternative is used. Ultimately the health technology assessment… Read More »The ethics of doing nothing
The ongoing Occupy… protests around the world have brought more attention to the debate on income inequality in the world. Wage variance has increased in the last thirty years, most notably in the United States. In the UK, for example,… Read More »Income inequality and health