Estimating treatment effect on medical cost and examining medical cost trajectory using splines and change point techniques.

In the world of growing medical needs, other than the clinical outcomes, the cost of healthcare is one of the important aspects to evaluate. The cost of treatment could act as a decisive factor on which one to choose from two equally likely effective treatment options. In literature, the most used quantity for the cost of treatment is cumulative lifetime cost since the diagnosis of a disease. While it provides a bird\u27 eye view of the treatment cost, it fails to capture the underlying pattern of the treatment cost trajectory. We developed a marginal structural functional model (MSFM) using an I-spline basis to examine the accumulative cost trajectory over time. Further, to obtain a valid average treatment effect (ATE) estimator, we used the inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to control the confounding between the cost and the treatment groups. Penalized spline regressions were used to estimate the cost trajectory and ATE. We carried out extensive simulation studies to examine the performance of the proposed method. We also applied our proposed method on gastric cancers patients in SEER-Medicare 2005-2014 database and illustrated the cost pattern over time under different treatments. Another important aspect of healthcare cost is to identify the underlying pattern of the cost due to a disease. The estimation of healthcare cost and locating the change points across the cost trajectory is important to policymakers and clinicians, given the increasing costs of healthcare delivery, budgetary constraints, and the aging population. While in the literature the lifetime cost was often studied, the estimation of cost patterns and change points for cost patterns are important to policymakers and insurance companies. We develop a piece-wise linear mixed effect change point model as well as a I-spline based non-parametric model to estimate the cost trajectory over time and evaluate the change points for cost. We model the patient-level cost trajectory as well as population-level cost trajectory by using the patient-level regression parameters, which depend on patient-level characteristics and treatment choices. We applied our proposed methods on pancreatic cancer patients in SEER-Medicare 2005-2014 database and concluded that both models capture the cost trajectory as well the change points

On discriminating between Libby-Novick generalized beta and Kumaraswamy distributions: theory and methods

In fitting a continuous bounded data, the generalized beta (and several variants of this distribution) and the two-parameter Kumaraswamy (KW) distributions are the two most prominent univariate continuous distributions that come to our mind. There are some common features between these two rival probability models and to select one of them in a practical situation can be of great interest. Consequently, in this paper, we discuss various methods of selection between the generalized beta proposed by Libby and Novick (1982) (LNGB) and the KW distributions, such as the criteria based on probability of correct selection which is an improvement over the likelihood ratio statistic approach, and also based on pseudo-distance measures. We obtain an approximation for the probability of correct selection under the hypotheses HLNGB and HKW , and select the model that maximizes it. However, our proposal is more appealing in the sense that we provide the comparison study for the LNGB distribution that subsumes both types of classical beta and exponentiated generators (see, for details, Cordeiro et al. 2014; Libby and Novick 1982) which can be a natural competitor of a two-parameter KW distribution in an appropriate scenario.Comment: 11 page

The Juristic Nature of Taxation

Taxation is modal: tax may be used to achieve several different social objectives, achievable by other means, both legal and non-legal. Taxation is heavily under-theorised. Juristic definitions of taxation, (in case law, textbooks or economic works) are inevitably thin and without analytical foundation. In particular, there has long been a misconceived notion of taxation as a property obligation rather than what it actually is, a personal monetary obligation. This has spawned a battle on the legitimacy of taxation between libertarians and egalitarians which has been fought on the wrong ground (property rights) entirely. A recognition of taxation as a personal monetary obligation has important practical consequences: First for the categorisation of certain charges (such as NIC) as “taxes” whereas other charges (such as particular tax-related penalties) are not “taxes” despite being contained in a Finance Act; second, the jurisdiction of the First Tier Tribunal (Tax Chamber) must, as a result, accommodate certain notions of legitimate expectation which would not be the case if taxation were a property obligation. Taxation may easily be distinguished not only from property obligations but from other monetary liabilities, such as the obligation to pay contractual monetary consideration for goods or services, a civil penalty, a criminal fine, or tortious damages. The distinction is made clear through the techniques of “individuation”, that is, the description of (here) obligations by reference to the legal norms embedded in the legal material which gives rise to each type of monetary obligation, as exemplified by Raz, Bentham and Kelsen. It is thus that taxation may be “individuated” from other areas of law. And the monetary nature of a tax obligation exposes a profound relationship between monetary obligations and responsibility (so that a purely monetary responsibility dilutes responsibility and also the effectiveness of tax in particular modes)

Using Media Articles About Company Strategies To Teach Economics To MBA Students

In this paper, the author expands on the idea of using up-to-date examples to teach applications of economic concepts. In the MBA Managerial Economics class, the author use profiles of two companies’ decision-making strategies and their successes to show the applications of economic concepts used by the companies. This provides an even clearer relationship between economics and the real world as students are able to follow the entire story of one company and relate different economic concepts that this firm has used during the part of their existence that is profiled. This provides a stronger link between the real life business world and economic concepts than before