Books: Winter, 2018

Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Edited by Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt,
and David M. Cutler
512 pages, 62 line drawings, 113 tables
$130 (cloth)

Health care costs represent nearly 18 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and 20 percent 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. Some examples: research in this volume investigates 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.

U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy

Edited by Richard B. Freeman and Hal Salzman
320 pages, 39 line drawings, 61 tables
$130 (cloth)

Since the late 1950s, the engineering job market in the United States has been fraught with fears of a shortage of engineering skill and talent. U.S. Engineering in a Global Economy brings clarity to issues of supply and demand in this important market. Following a general overview of engineering-labor market trends, the volume examines the educational pathways of undergraduate engineers and their entry into the labor market, the impact on productivity and innovation of engineers working in firms, and various dimensions of the changing engineering labor market, from licensing to changes in demand and guest worker programs.

The volume provides insights on engineering education, practice, and careers that can inform educational institutions, funding agencies, and policy makers about the challenges facing the United States in developing its engineering workforce in the global economy.

Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages

Edited by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz
304 pages, 77 line drawings, 70 tables
$130 (cloth)

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s and has persisted for decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Today's older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. Why is this so?

In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women's later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women's labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 18

Edited by Josh Lerner and Scott Stern
160 pages
$60 (cloth)

The 18th annual volume of the NBER's Innovation Policy and the Economy series focuses on research exploring the interplay between new technologies and organizational structures, such as networks and corporations. Glenn Ellison and Sara Fisher Ellison explore how consumer search in a technology-mediated marketplace can affect the incentives for firms to engage in price obfuscation. Aaron Chatterji focuses on the role of innovation in American primary and secondary education (K-12), emphasizing recent evidence on the efficacy of classroom technologies. Economic sociologist Olav Sorenson considers how information, influence, and resources flow through innovation networks. The last two chapters focus on how corporate organizational structures influence innovation and dynamism. Andreas Nilsson and David Robinson develop a synthetic framework for understanding the emergence and choices of social entrepreneurs and socially responsible firms. Steven Kaplan argues that there is little empirical evidence to support the common claim that investor pressure for short-term financial results leads U.S. companies to underinvest systematically in long-term capital expenditures and R&D.