The production of data, and the functioning of the market for observations, are universal concerns to all fields of positive economics. Economists, however, have typically placed greater emphasis on systematically analyzing the consumption of data than on considering its production. In the production of data through surveys, an important input market is that of labor, in which a demander trades observations with the supplying sample members. This paper analyzes optimal monopsony compensation in such data markets, the important relationship it bears to estimation using the data that are obtained, and the statistical effects of implicit public wage regulations that are present in U.S. markets for observations.

We review the recent but growing economic literature on the worldwide growth of obesity, relating the review to a recent anthology of articles—Obesity, Business and Public Policy. We discuss the competing explanations for the growth of obesity as well as the role of governments in attempting to limit it.

This paper analyzes the savings and longevity impacts of mortality‐contingent claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one's life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life insurance programs, as well as the rapid increase in the life expectancy of older ages, motivates a better understanding of the incentive effects that mortality‐contingent claims have on longevity‐related behavior. We claim that these incentives in often alter the standard conclusions obtained about old‐age support when mortality is treated exogenously. In particular, we argue that annuities involve moral hazard effects that increase longevity and, among other things, introduce a positive interaction between public programs for health care and income support for the elderly‐programs that have grown enormously in developed countries

This paper analyzes how markets for old-age care respond to the aging of populations. We consider how the biological forces which govern the stocks of frail and healthy persons in a population interact with economic forces which govern the demand and supply for labor-intensive care.... We test our predictions empirically using state- and county-level evidence on the U.S. market for long-term care in nursing homes over the last three decades. (EXCERPT)

This paper uses direct evidence to evaluate whether asymmetric information is a barrier to trade in the largest market for private insurance in the world: life insurance. We report several findings that seem difficult to reconcile with the conventional theory of insurance under asymmetric information. We conjecture that sellers may know their costs of production better than consumers in this market, as in those for most other products.

This paper concerns inferring how self-interested subjects, as opposed to altruistic investigators, evaluate treatments in social experiments. The authors argue that the attrition behavior of subjects reveals their evaluation and discuss the usefulness of using such data in performing subject-based evaluation. The authors study the causes of disagreements between investigators and subjects in evaluating treatments and empirically assess the degree to which they disagree. The paper provides an empirical framework for estimating the systematic level of disagreement in the presence of such errors. Using clinical trials, the authors find substantial evidence of overapproval by investigators in about one-third of the trials analyzed.