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Essays in Innovation, Past and Present
Full text linkThis dissertation studies the economics of historical and modern innovation. The first chapter makes inroads into understanding how competition and incentives shape the creative process which lies at the heart of all technological progress. The creative act is a classic example of a black box in academic research: we can see the inputs and outputs, but we know little about what happens in between. This paper uses new tools for measuring the content of digital media to see how commercial graphic designers’ work evolves in winner-take-all competition. In this chapter, I show that competition both creates and destroys incentives for innovation: some competition is necessary to motivate high-performers to experiment with novel, untested ideas over tweaking tried-and-true approaches, but heavy competition will drive them out of the market.In the second chapter, I study the effects of performance feedback on innovation in competitive settings. Feedback typically serves two functions: it informs agents of their relative performance, and it also helps them improve the quality of their product. The presence of these effects suggests a tradeoff between participation and improvement, as the revelation of asymmetries discourages effort. Using data from the same setting as chapter one, I first show that this tradeoff is real. I then develop a structural model of the setting -- the first of its kind in the literature -- and use the results to evaluate counterfactual feedback policies. The results suggest that feedback is on net a desirable mechanism for a principal seeking high-quality innovation.In the third chapter, I use the farm tractor as a case study to demonstrate that technologies diffuse along two distinct margins: scale and scope. Although tractors are now used in nearly every field operation and with nearly all crops, early models were far more limited in their capabilities, and only in the late 1920s did the technology begin to generalize for broader use with row crops such as corn. Diffusion prior to 1930 was accordingly heavily concentrated in the Wheat Belt, while growth in diffusion from 1930-1940 was concentrated in the Corn Belt. Other historically important innovations in agriculture and manufacturing share similar histories of expanding scope. The key to understanding the pace and path of technology diffusion is thus not only in explaining the number of different users, but also in explaining the number of different uses.A common theme across all three chapters is the focus on developing tools or strategies to study innovation that are less dependent on patent data than the extant literature, since the majority of innovation is not patented (and often not patentable), and doing so while advancing the empirical literature on innovation in new directions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Essays in Health Economics
Full text linkThe influence of individual healthcare providers on healthcare utilization has important implications for healthcare systems and cost savings policies. Primary care physicians may be particularly influential because they have central, coordination roles in medicine, yet little is known about their impacts on healthcare utilization. This dissertation provides new empirical evidence on two fundamental questions. First, to what extent do differences in practice styles of individual primary care physicians, as measured by their patients' spending, explain variation in healthcare utilization? Second, do patients incur switching costs in the form of temporarily higher healthcare utilization when they switch PCPs? Specifically, I study the long-run and short-run effects of switching to different primary care physicians on patient healthcare utilization among traditional fee-for-service Original Medicare patients who are ages 65-99 in the United States. In the first chapter, I show that patients who switch from a primary care physician whose other patients have low utilization to one whose other patients have high utilization experience increases in long-run utilization, whereas patients who switch in the opposite direction experience decreases. Regardless of the direction of the change, patients experience short-run increases in utilization around the switch. Using a model that includes both patient and physician fixed effects, I find that differences in primary care physician practice styles, as measured by spending, explain about 2% of the variation in long-run total utilization and about 13% of the variation in long-run primary care utilization within regional markets. In the second chapter, I estimate the short-run effects of switching primary care physicians on patient utilization. I focus on patients who involuntarily switch because their physicians relocate or retire, such that the timing of the switches is exogenous. Each primary care physician switch leads to approximately $500-725 in additional total utilization, and 20-30% comes from temporary increases in primary care utilization. Combining my findings from these two chapters, I construct counterfactuals and find that policies that reallocate patients across primary care physicians could potentially be counterproductive due to modest long-run savings and substantial short-run switching costs. Finally, I discuss potential mechanisms that could generate these switching costs and their welfare implications
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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Essays in Health Economics
Full text linkThe first chapter, co-authored with Season Majors, Christopher Connolly, Mary Ann Friesen and Hassan Ahmed, studies how electronic blood glucose monitoring impacts physician and patient behavior. Recent technological development has led to increased availability of patient generated health data, which has the potential to influence medical treatment and health outcomes. However, it is not well understood how to most effectively integrate this new technology and data into large health systems. We conducted an experimental evaluation of multiple approaches to increase utilization of electronic blood glucose monitoring, among 7,052 patients with diabetes at 20 primary care practices. A physician education intervention successfully increased provider take-up of an online blood glucose monitoring tool by 64 percentage points relative to control, while a comparison of patient-focused reminder interventions revealed that emphasizing accountability to the provider was most successful at encouraging patients to actively track their blood glucose online. An assessment of downstream outcomes also revealed impacts of the interventions on prescribing behavior and A1c testing frequency. We interpret these results in the context of a conceptual framework in which patient generated data can affect patient behavior directly, and may also influence physician treatment decisions by acting as a complement or substitute for traditional health data sources. In the second chapter, I study the effects of Medicaid and other means-tested benefits on immigrants' health outcomes, health care utilization, financial outcomes, and remittance behavior. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 bars most legal immigrants from receiving social benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP for their first five years of residency in the United States. I exploit this discontinuity in benefit eligibility to estimate the causal impact of means-tested benefits using regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approaches. I find evidence for decreased savings and increased use of the emergency department as a result of gaining eligibility for Medicaid and SNAP.In the third chapter, co-authored with Benjamin R. Handel, we conduct a randomized evaluation of strategies to facilitate advance directive (AD) completion among 4,850 patients aged 65 and over. Despite the significant economic and personal implications of end-of-life healthcare decisions, many fail to document their wishes or to select a representative who can make medical decisions on their behalf. We evaluate the effects of (i) an in-person drive to facilitate AD completion and (ii) electronic distribution of an informational video discussing advanced care planning. Among patients to whom communication was sent via email, we find no effect of in-person AD drives or of the informational video on AD upload rates. However, we estimate a 4.5 percentage point increase in AD uploads for patients who were contacted via letter about the AD drive, relative to patients who were sent a reminder letter only. This suggests that in-person drives may be impactful for increasing AD completion, but only if effectively advertised to patients. We also leverage surveys and granular data on patient health to understand how information frictions and hassle costs may influence advance care planning decisions
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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