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causality

Hawking is right, Jeremy Hunt does egregiously cherry pick the evidence

I’m beginning to think Jeremy Hunt doesn’t actually care what the evidence says on the weekend effect. Last week, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking criticized Hunt for ‘cherry picking’ evidence with regard to the ‘weekend effect’: that patients admitted at the… Read More »Hawking is right, Jeremy Hunt does egregiously cherry pick the evidence

Meeting round-up: 7th annual Vancouver Health Economics Methodology (VanHEM) meeting

The 7th annual Vancouver Health Economics Methodology (VanHEM) meeting took place on June 16 in Vancouver, Canada. This one-day conference brings together health economists from across the Pacific Northwest, including Vancouver, Washington State, and Calgary. This has always been more… Read More »Meeting round-up: 7th annual Vancouver Health Economics Methodology (VanHEM) meeting

Transformative treatments: a big methodological challenge for health economics

Social scientists, especially economists, are concerned with causal inference: understanding whether and how an event causes a certain effect. Typically, we subscribe to the view that causal relations are reducible to sets of counterfactuals, and we use ever more sophisticated… Read More »Transformative treatments: a big methodological challenge for health economics

Does political reform really reduce child mortality?

Measuring causal effects is a tricky business. But, it’s necessary if we want to appropriately design effective policies and interventions. Many things are not amenable to manipulation in an experiment and so we rely upon a toolbox of statistical tools… Read More »Does political reform really reduce child mortality?