Working Paper: NBER ID: w19593
Authors: Frank R. Lichtenberg
Abstract: I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the age-adjusted mortality rate from the disease. The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer, i.e. cancer at different sites in the body (lung, colon, breast, etc.). Time-series data on the number of publications pertaining to each cancer site were obtained from PubMed. For articles published since 1975, it is possible to distinguish between publications indicating and not indicating any research funding support. \n \nMy estimates indicate that mortality rates: (1) are unrelated to the (current or lagged) stock of publications that had not received research funding; (2) are only weakly inversely related to the contemporaneous stock of published articles that received research funding; and (3) are strongly inversely related to the stock of articles that had received research funding and been published 5 and 10 years earlier. The effect after 10 years is 66% larger than the contemporaneous effect. The strong inverse correlation between mortality growth and growth in the lagged number of publications that were supported by research funding is not driven by a small number of outliers.
Keywords: biomedical research; mortality; cancer; publications; health outcomes
JEL Codes: J11; O33; O40
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| growth in the number of research publications (O44) | change in mortality rates (J11) |
| funded research publications (I22) | change in mortality rates (J11) |
| contemporaneous stock of publications (not funded) (Y30) | mortality rates (I12) |
| lagged stock of publications (not funded) (H68) | mortality rates (I12) |
| contemporaneous stock of funded publications (G10) | mortality rates (I12) |
| lagged stock of funded publications (5 years) (H68) | mortality rates (I12) |
| lagged stock of funded publications (10 years) (H54) | mortality rates (I12) |