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Department of Economics
Doctoral Course

Applied Health Economics

Doctoral Course, June 22 – July 3 2009 Department of Economics, University of Bergen

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Course description

The course will show how econometrics can be used by health economists to evaluate health policies and in duration analysis. There will be a strong emphasis on applied work, illustrating the use of relevant computer software, such as Stata. Computing facilities will be available but it is recommended that participants bring their own laptop computers if possible. The computing practicals will use Stata v9. The course lasts for two weeks and consists of two parts. Candidates who submit a term paper for approval by October 1 will get 10 credits for full course participation and an approved term paper.


Part 1: Using Econometrics to Evaluate Health Policies (Prof A. Jones) June 22-26 2009

The course will focus on the use of non-experimental data to estimate causal models and evaluate ‘treatment effects'. The emphasis is on the issues that arise in health economics in finding appropriate data and reliable identification strategies, rather than on the underlying econometric theory. Particular attention will be devoted to econometric methods that can be used to model health care utilization and expenditure, including binary data, count data and skewed and fat-tailed distributions.

 

Part 2: Survival Analysis/Duration Models (Prof M. Lindeboom)
June 29–July 3 2009

Duration models are developed to describe time spent in a specific state. In the context of health economics this could for instance be individual life time, time spent in bad health (sickness), time spent in a hospital etc. This part of the course discusses issues of specification and identification of these duration models. We discuss estimation of these models using maximum likelihood and (stratified) partial likelihood techniques. We also discuss the evaluation of treatment effects in the context of these models. As in Part 1, emphasis is on the use of these methods in practical applications. We will discuss applications in the literature (labour economics, health economics and demographics) and illustrate the methods on some datasets.

Lecturers

Professor Andrew Jones, Health Economics Bergen (HEB), Norway &
Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, UK. For more information, read here.

Professor Maarten Lindeboom, Health Economics Bergen (HEB), Norway &
Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands. For more information, read here.

 

Accommodation

You may contact randi.higraff@eia.uib.no for cheap accommodation at the University of Bergen, but this alternative is often fully booked. Otherwise you will find useful information about accommodation here http://www.visitbergen.com/

 

For further information, please contact Associate Professor Oddvar M. Kaarbøe (Oddvar.Kaarboe@econ.uib.no) (+47) 55 58 92 16

For registration, please contact Executive Officer Camilla Johannessen (Camilla.Johannessen@econ.uib.no) (+47) 55 58 92 00. Final date for registration is the 15.th of May 2009.

 

For list of Reading material part 1 and 2, see below