Tag Archives: Baumol’s cost

Incomes & the Cost of a Colonoscopy across US Cities

I’m a bit late to posting this since I had my qualifying exams on Monday, but I saw this map for the front page story of this Sunday’s NYTimes and thought it was interesting. It shows how much the cost … Continue reading

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Accounting for the Cost of US Healthcare

I read Steven Brill’s healthcare piece recently and wanted to get a better high-level view of where dollars in the healthcare system are spent. I find aggregate data more informative than anecdotes about hospital bill line items (not that I … Continue reading

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What books do top CEOs, policymakers, academics, etc recommend reading this year?

Barry Eichengreen sends us to Bloomberg’s interesting compilation of 2012 book recommendations from CEO, policy makers, investors, economists, academics and authors. The most popular picks were Robert A. Caro’s “The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” “Volcker: The Triumph … Continue reading

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The Growing Burden of Payroll Taxes

Here’s a column on reforming the payroll tax that I wrote in NYTimes Economix today: Payroll taxes and corporate income taxes accounted for an equal share of federal tax revenue in 1969. By 2009, payroll taxes generated more than six times as much … Continue reading

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Why do We Need Productivity Gains in the Education Sector?

1. Antiquated Lectures: the college lecture format is antiquated. In my first year of graduate school, Brad Delong mentioned that the lecture format originally stemmed from a scarcity of books. Since only a few books were available, lecturers had to … Continue reading

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Why Healthcare, Education, and Government Spending Keep Going Up – Baumol’s Cost Disease

The Economist reviews an important book that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently (research extending these ideas is forthcoming). HEALTH-CARE expenditure in America is growing at a disturbing rate: in 1960 it was just over 5% of GDP, in … Continue reading

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Books I’m looking forward to reading: The Cost Disease

As I explained in a previous post, the effects of heterogenous productivity growth across sectors has huge impacts on the economy and on the cost of providing government services. Here’s Larry Summers on this issue: Third, increases in the price … Continue reading

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Why are health and education costs exploding? Clues from Long Run Relative Prices

This isn’t the prettiest chart I’ve ever made, but it’s quite important. It shows that health  (shades of blue) and education (green) prices have increased nearly 7X more than durable goods prices (reddish colors) since early 1980s. This massive increase … Continue reading

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