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A Theory Of Health Disparities And Medical Technology, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Dana Goldman Aug 2005

A Theory Of Health Disparities And Medical Technology, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Dana Goldman

Darius N. Lakdawalla

Better-educated people are healthier, although the sources of this relationship remain unclear. Starting with basic principles of consumer theory, we develop a model of how health disparities are determined that does not depend on the precise causal mechanism. Improvements in the productivity of health care disproportionately benefit the heaviest health care users. Since richer patients tend to use the most health care, this suggests that new technologies—by making more diseases treatable, reducing the price of health care, or improving health care productivity—could widen socioeconomic disparities in health. An exception to this rule, however, is a simplifying technology, which can contract …


Is There Skill-Biased Technological Change In Italian Manufacturing? Evidence From Firm-Level Data, Massimiliano Bratti, Nicola Matteucci Jan 2005

Is There Skill-Biased Technological Change In Italian Manufacturing? Evidence From Firm-Level Data, Massimiliano Bratti, Nicola Matteucci

Nicola Matteucci

The bulk of the literature on the Skill-Biased Technological Change (SBTC) hypothesis has focused on the US and the UK, while evidence on other countries is ‘mixed’. We use firm-level data to test for the presence of SBTC in Italian manufacturing. The interest stems from the fact that Italy is a “late comer” country, suffers a gap in new technologies and has a ‘rigid’ labour market. We estimate employment-share equations using as a skill-ratio two alternative measures, the ratio between white collars and blue collars (WC/BC) and that between graduates and non-graduates (G/NG). We find an unconventional evidence supporting SBTC. …


Law As Design: Objects, Concepts, And Digital Things, Michael J. Madison Jan 2005

Law As Design: Objects, Concepts, And Digital Things, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Article initiates an account of things in the law, including both conceptual things and material things. Human relationships matter to the design of law. Yet things matter too. To an increasing extent, and particularly via the advent of digital technology, those relationships are not only considered ex post by the law but are designed into things, ex ante, by their producers. This development has a number of important dimensions. Some are familiar, such as the reification of conceptual things as material things, so that computer software is treated as a good. Others are new, such as the characterization of …


Innovation And Employment, Mario Pianta Dec 2004

Innovation And Employment, Mario Pianta

Mario Pianta

The relationship between innovation and employment is a complex one and has long been a topical issue in economic theory. Moving from the classical question ‘‘does technology create or destroy jobs?’’ recent research has investigated the impact of different types of innovation and the structural and institutional factors affecting the quantity of employment change. Quality aspects have received increasing attention, with questions of ‘‘what type of jobs are created or destroyed by innovation?’’ This line of research has asked, ‘‘how does the composition of skills change’’ and ‘‘how does the wage structure change,’’ leading to a large literature on skill …