Economics Insights @ CBS

I investigate whether diseases subject to more rapid pharmaceutical innovation experienced greater declines in Americans’ disability days and use of medical services during the period 1997–2010, controlling for several other factors, using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. The mean number of work loss days, school loss days, and hospital admissions declined more rapidly among medical conditions with larger increases in the mean number of new (post-1990) prescription drugs consumed.

Can subsidies promote Pareto-optimum coordination? We found that partially subsidizing the cooperative actions for two out of six players in a laboratory coordination game usually produced better coordination and higher total social welfare with both deterministic and stochastic payoffs. Not only were the subsidized players more likely to cooperate (choose the Pareto-optimum action), but the unsubsidized players increased their expectations on how likely others would cooperate, and they cooperated more frequently themselves.

We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500 options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. We evaluate a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models to produce an accurate measure of the conditional variance. We then examine the predictive power of the VIX and its two components for stock market returns, economic activity and financial instability.

International business (IB) research has predominantly relied on value constructs to account for the influence of societal culture, notably Hofstede's cultural dimensions. While parsimonious, the value approach's assumptions about the consensus of values within nations, and the generality and stability of cultural patterns of behavior are increasingly challenged.

This work examines the process of admission to a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). ICUs currently lack systematic admission criteria, largely because the impact of ICU admission on patient outcomes has not been well quantified. This makes evaluating the performance of candidate admission strategies difficult. Using a large patient-level data set of more than 190,000 hospitalizations across 15 hospitals, we first quantify the cost of denied ICU admission for a number of patient outcomes.