Updating and expanding substantially on her earlier work, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, this new collection bridges the medical/social divide in an accessible and personable way.
This collection of Michael Grossman’s most important papers adds essential background and depth to his work on economic determinants of public health. Each of the book’s four sections includes an introduction that contextualizes the issues and addresses the larger stakes of his work. An afterword discusses the significance of Grossman’s approach for subsequent research on health economics, as well as the work others have done to advance and extend his innovative perspective. Determinants of Health explains how the economic choices people make influence health and health behaviors. It begins with a section on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical results of Grossman’s groundbreaking health economics model, first introduced in the 1970s, followed by essays on the relationship between health and schooling; determinants of infant health, with a special emphasis on public policies and programs; and the economics of unhealthy behaviors. Grossman treats health as a form of human capital. He shows that public policies and programs that determine the price and availability of key inputs have critical effects on outcomes ranging from birth weight and infant mortality to cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and obesity. Grossman’s approach has led to a major stream of literature in the field, sparking contributions by the world’s leading health economists, including Joseph Newhouse, Jonathan Gruber, Amy Finkelstein, Michael Greenstone, and David Cutler. His clarity on the role that economics play in people’s good and bad health choices is immensely valuable to the debate over how we legislate and spend on health.
In a concise, compelling argument, one of the founders and most influential advocates of the law and economics movement divides the subject into two separate areas, which he identifies with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The first, Benthamite, strain, “economic analysis of law,” examines the legal system in the light of economic theory and shows how economics might render law more effective. The second strain, law and economics, gives equal status to law, and explores how the more realistic, less theoretical discipline of law can lead to improvements in economic theory. It is the latter approach that Judge Calabresi advocates, in a series of eloquent, thoughtful essays that will appeal to students and scholars alike.
In March of 2020, our daily lives were upended by the COVID pandemic and subsequent school closures. With work and school shifting online, a new and ongoing set of demands has been placed on parents as school moved to online, virtual and hybrid models of learning. Families need to balance professional responsibilities with parenting and supporting their children’s education. As education professors, we find ourselves in a particular position as our expertise collides with the reality of schooling our own children in our homes during a global pandemic. This book focuses on the experiences of education faculty who navigate this relationship as pandemic professionals and pandemic parents. In this collection of personal essays, we explore parenting in the pandemic among education professors. Through our stories, we share our perspectives on this moment of upheaval, as we find ourselves confronting practical (and impractical) aspects of long held theories about what school could be, seeing up close and personally the pedagogy our children endure online, watching education policy go awry in our own living rooms (and kitchens and bathrooms), making high-stakes decisions about our children’s (and other children’s) access to opportunity, and trying to maintain our careers at the same time. In this collision of personal and professional identities, we find ourselves reflecting on fundamental questions about the purpose and design of schooling, the value of our work as education professors, and the precious relationships we hope to maintain with our children through this difficult time. Praise for Parenting in the Pandemic "Lowenhaupt and Theoharis have curated a magnificent collection of essays that captures the hopes, fears, tensions, and possibilities of parenting in a time of crisis. A gift to parents and educators everywhere as we continue to process and reflect on what the pandemic has taught us about what it means to educate others, and perhaps through a renewed imagination, our very own children." - Sonya Douglass Horsford, Teachers College, Columbia University "In this powerful collection of essays, we have a rare window into how the personal and professional worlds of academics collided during the COVID-19 pandemic. What emerges from these reflections is an intimate portrait of the longstanding tensions in our lives as public intellectuals and parents that have long burned as embers, but are now set ablaze by the public health, economic, and educational crisis we have lived through during the last year. Reading these essays will help us to see questions of education policy and practice in a new, more personal light." - Matthew Kraft, Brown University
Economic Impact or Contribution contributes to the applied regional economic literature by providing a framework for handling a diverse set of projects and providing detailed case studies of fieldwork regarding the health care industry, higher education institutions, the nonprofit sector, infrastructure investment, and a major musical entertainment event. Economic Impact or Contribution accomplishes three major tasks by answering the following questions: What are the differences between the economic concepts used in economic versus fiscal assessment studies? How can we structure an economic and business issue or challenge? How can we create a research product that helps the project’s sponsors solve their problem? This bookhas emerged as an answer to many research-related questions in dealing with regional business and economic issues and challenges.
This Handbook features the best teaching practices in the Health Economics (HE) field over the past decade. HE is still considered a new field in the world of economics. The teaching materials are designed for and suitable to HE specializations housed in economics departments, schools of public health, health professions, health sciences, nursing, pharmacy, business, or public/health administration.
This book bridges the disciplines of micro-economics and social policy in general, and, in particular, behavioral/explanatory social policy and public choice theory, plus Leibenstein’s X-efficiency theory. Being trained as an economist and social policy scientist, the author leaps out of the comfort zone of most social policy scientists and experts, right into the exciting world of micro-economic theory, and then extending and connecting those theories to explain major social, political and economic conundrums of our time. In doing so, the book offers a new set of theoretical—and practical—explanations derived from the general proposition of micro-economic theory, of how government officers, policymakers, administrators and the people themselves alike are, by and large, motivated in their daily as well as strategic (long-term) decision-making. Using a meta-analytical approach (based on a number of grand theories), this book also explains systemic factors behind human behavior and the thereof resulting shortcomings in lifetime outcomes (health, wealth and happiness of a person) and at the same time societal, policy-making, and economic outcomes on societal level, and in global comparison. The outcomes thereof can be measured exactly (and hence validated), especially through the method of empirical comparative social science/economic research. Here, the author also (but not only) introduces the new method of using Aspalter's Standardized Relative Performance (SRP) Index in measuring exactly complex, aggregate performances of multiple governments, and that at the same time also across the entire world.
The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics provides an accessible and authoritative guide to health economics, intended for scholars and students in the field, as well as those in adjacent disciplines including health policy and clinical medicine. The chapters stress the direct impact of health economics reasoning on policy and practice, offering readers an introduction to the potential reach of the discipline. Contributions come from internationally-recognized leaders in health economics and reflect the worldwide reach of the discipline. Authoritative, but non-technical, the chapters place great emphasis on the connections between theory and policy-making, and develop the contributions of health economics to problems arising in a variety of institutional contexts, from primary care to the operations of health insurers. The volume addresses policy concerns relevant to health systems in both developed and developing countries. It takes a broad perspective, with relevance to systems with single or multi-payer health insurance arrangements, and to those relying predominantly on user charges; contributions are also included that focus both on medical care and on non-medical factors that affect health. Each chapter provides a succinct summary of the current state of economic thinking in a given area, as well as the author's unique perspective on issues that remain open to debate. The volume presents a view of health economics as a vibrant and continually advancing field, highlighting ongoing challenges and pointing to new directions for further progress.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.