Spurious correlation in estimation of the health production function: A note

IF 0.6 Q3 Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Economics Bulletin Pub Date : 2009-05-05 DOI:10.3929/ETHZ-A-005799493

Şule Akkoyunlu, F. Lichtenberg, Boriss Siliverstovs, P. Zweifel

引用次数: 27

Abstract

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to detect and avoid spurious correlation. It then applies it to a recent contribution by Lichtenberg (2004), which relates longevity in the United States to pharmaceutical innovation and public health care expenditure. The results of the bounds testing procedure show longevity to be linearly related to these two factors. Therefore, the estimates reported by Lichtenberg (2004) cannot be said to be result of spurious correlation, to the contrary, they very likely reflect an effective relationship, at least for the United States.

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健康生产函数估计中的伪相关:注

在本文中，我们以系统的方式解决了健康生产中的虚假相关问题。虚假相关性带来了将健康状况与医疗(和非医疗)输入联系起来的风险，而实际上并不存在联系。本文首先介绍了作为检测和避免伪相关的一种方法的边界检验程序。然后，它将其应用于Lichtenberg(2004)最近的一项贡献，该贡献将美国的寿命与制药创新和公共卫生保健支出联系起来。边界测试程序的结果表明，寿命与这两个因素线性相关。因此，不能说Lichtenberg(2004)报告的估计是虚假相关的结果，相反，它们很可能反映了一种有效的关系，至少对美国来说是这样。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Economics Bulletin ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

1.60

自引率

0.00%

发文量

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