Health Economics

Description

In recent years, there has been a surge in applied research that uses methods of “causal inference”. These methods attempt to create ceteris paribus conditions (all else equal) in order to isolate the causal effect of a policy or intervention on some outcome of importance. What makes this difficult is the problem of selection bias which can lead the estimated average effect of a policy to be more or less than the true average.  In this writing prompt, write 500 words using the guidelines below.  Here is a sample essay Pose a research question related to health economics.  Pick a topic you care about. It will lower the cost exerting effort.  Motivate the research question. Put another way, answer the questions:  Why should others care?  Why is your question important? Describe the hypothesis Draw on economic theory to detail what you expect will happen. Describe the ideal experiment. Put another way, if you had no constraints (time, money, ethical, etc.) what experiment would you run to best answer your research question? Make clear: What is the outcome variable or variables? Make clear: What is the important variation in the independent variable? Often it is implausible to do the perfect experiment. There really are monetary and ethical constraints that prevent us from doing experiments. In the absence of an experiment, what are possible sources of selection bias? Would that selection bias lead to an overstatement or understatement of the true effect?