Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. The research in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs seeks to connect our knowledge of expenditures with what we are able to measure of results, probing questions of methodology, changes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the shifting landscape of physician practice. The research in this volume investigates, for example, obesity's effect on health care spending, the effect of generic pharmaceutical releases on the market, and the disparity between disease-based and population-based spending measures. This vast and varied volume applies a range of economic tools to the analysis of health care and health outcomes. Practical and descriptive, this new volume in the Studies in Income and Wealth series is full of insights relevant to health policy students and specialists alike.

Personalized and precision medicine (PPM)—the targeting of therapies according to an individual’s genetic, environmental, or lifestyle characteristics—is becoming an increasingly important approach in health care treatment and prevention. The advancement of PPM is a challenge in traditional clinical, reimbursement, and regulatory landscapes because it is costly to develop and introduces a wide range of scientific, clinical, ethical, and socioeconomic issues. PPM raises a multitude of economic issues, including how information on accurate diagnosis and treatment success will be disseminated and who will bear the cost; changes to physician training to incorporate genetics, probability and statistics, and economic considerations; questions about whether the benefits of PPM will be confined to developed countries or will diffuse to emerging economies with less developed health care systems; the effects of patient heterogeneity on cost-effectiveness analysis; and opportunities for PPM’s growth beyond treatment of acute illness, such as prevention and reversal of chronic conditions. This volume explores the intersection of the scientific, clinical, and economic factors affecting the development of PPM, including its effects on the drug pipeline, on reimbursement of PPM diagnostics and treatments, and on funding of the requisite underlying research; and it examines recent empirical applications of PPM.

Aggregate Advertising Expenditure in the U.S. Economy provides evidence that over the period 2000 through 2018 nominal aggregate advertising spending in the U.S. as a share of nominal GDP has been falling. The elasticity of advertising with respect to nominal GDP appears to have increased substantially since the late 1990s. The authors further show that nominal aggregate advertising spending has become more responsive to changes in real GDP and GDP price inflation. Finally, the monograph considers the implications of ongoing developments in the management of advertising campaigns and pending public policy issues surrounding controversial digital advertising practices for how advertising's macroeconomic role may evolve in the future. The authors stress the development of media-specific and aggregate media mix prices indices as being the critical next step in advancing understanding of the sensitivity of aggregate spending on advertising to cyclical and secular shifts in total economic activity and the components thereof. Following a short introduction, section II provides some historical background on the twin problems of defining advertising in the face of its ever-changing boundaries and measuring its output as a service industry. Section III sketches the vertical structure of the U.S. advertising industry and describes the set of four time series assembled that measure nominal aggregate advertising spending by advertisers and the related revenues of two sectors who function as service providers to advertisers -- advertising agencies and media firms. Section IV reviews the media price indices available from private sector sources and the BLS. Section V presents the double log constant elasticity model that serves as the conceptual framework underlying the analysis of the relationship of nominal aggregate adverting spending to GDP. Section VI reports extensive analyses of autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation coefficients calculated in order to assess whether the measures of nominal advertising spending exhibit stationarity and guide our choice of the order of moving average autoregressive function specifications. Section VII presents the results indicating that a structural shift in the sensitivity of nominal aggregate advertising to GDP occurred around the turn of the century when, in nominal terms, aggregate ad spending became more responsive to not only changes in nominal GDP but also to changes in real GDP and to changes in GDP inflation. Section VIII discusses implications of changes in the management of advertising campaigns accompanying the ascendancy of digital media and the resolution of public policy issues surrounding digital advertising practices. Section IX summarizes the main conclusions.

This book brings together presentations of some of the fundamental new research that has begun to appear in the areas of dynamic structural modeling, nonlinear structural modeling, time series modeling, nonparametric inference, and chaotic attractor inference. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the third of a conference series entitled International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. This conference was held at the IC;s2 (Innovation, Creativity and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin on May 22-23, l986.

This book brings together presentations of some of the fundamental new research that has begun to appear in the areas of dynamic structural modeling, nonlinear structural modeling, time series modeling, nonparametric inference, and chaotic attractor inference. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the third of a conference series entitled International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. This conference was held at the IC;s2 (Innovation, Creativity and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin on May 22-23, l986.

With the United States and other developed nations spending as much as 14 percent of their GDP on medical care, economists and policy analysts are asking what these countries are getting in return. Yet it remains frustrating and difficult to measure the productivity of the medical care service industries.
This volume takes aim at that problem, while taking stock of where we are in our attempts to solve it. Much of this analysis focuses on the capacity to measure the value of technological change and other health care innovations. A key finding suggests that growth in health care spending has coincided with an increase in products and services that together reduce mortality rates and promote additional health gains. Concerns over the apparent increase in unit prices of medical care may thus understate positive impacts on consumer welfare. When appropriately adjusted for such quality improvements, health care prices may actually have fallen.
Provocative and compelling, this volume not only clarifies one of the more nebulous issues in health care analysis, but in so doing addresses an area of pressing public policy concern.