Administrative data and data linkage; collecting health
data for econometric analysis; categorical data methods; count data; duration analysis; econometric evaluation by non-experimental methods; econometric evaluation with randomized experiments; econometrics in technology assess- ment; macro panels; models of health care costs; models for risk adjustment; panel data methods; productivity analysis; simulation methods and mixture models; spatial econometrics.
At the beginning of my PhD I was quite stuck to find good data. I wanted data with good measures of mental health, physical health, employment, income, small area indicators and standard controls like age, gender, education and so on.… Read More »Longitudinal datasets of potential interest to health economists
Economists need data. In this post I want to introduce those of you who don’t know it to a magnificent data source – quandl.com. Quandl is an open source website that indexes a huge range of data – over 6,000,000… Read More »Data everywhere! – Introduction to Quandl
By Chris Sampson, David Whitehurst and Andrew Street In December 2012, an article was published in The European Journal of Health Economics with the title ‘Patients whose GP knows complementary medicine tend to have lower costs and live longer’. We… Read More »Bad science in health economics: complementary medicine, costs and mortality
In 1976, Robert Lucas wrote a paper that articulated a common criticism of macroeconomic policy-making based on historical data. The essence of the critique was that, since the parameters of macroeconometric models were not structural, they were liable to change… Read More »The Lucas critique and hospital quality
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
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
Simulation and data analysis are two of the principle parts of health economics research. Most Master’s courses teach both, although many focus more heavily on the former. There are many programs and packages available to a researcher, each with their… Read More »Tools of the trade