Working Papers
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Comment: (with Eric Helland)
ABSTRACT: We take
advantage of the fortuitous randomization of trial outcome to provide a
novel
strategy to identify the deterrent effect exclusive of incapacitation. We compare the post-sentencing criminal
activity of criminals who were convicted of a strikeable offense with
those who
were tried for a strikeable offense but convicted of a non-strikeable
offense. As a robustness check, we also
make this comparison in states without three strikes laws.
The identification strategy lets us estimate
the deterrent effect non-parametrically using data solely from the
three-strikes era. We find that California’s
three
strike legislation significantly reduces felony arrest rates among the
class of
criminals with 2 strikes by 17-20 percent.
Comment: (with Dan Klein). The heart of this paper is an
analysis of the written comments that physicians made to the
"consistency argument" (see the paper). We provide all the
comments here as Word documents. The responses are split into
three categories; the comments of challengers
who disputed the consistency argument, the comments
of liberalizers who agreed with the consistency argument, and final comments on the survey made by both
challengers and liberalizers. In the text these are denoted as
the
"g", "c" and "f" comments respectively.
ABSTRACT: The amended
Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act
requires efficacy certification for a drug’s initial uses (“on-label”),
but
does not require certification before physicians may prescribe the drug
for
subsequent uses (“off-label”). Does it
make sense to require FDA efficacy certification for new drugs but not
for new
uses of old drugs? Using a sequential
online survey we carried on a “virtual conversation” with some 500
physicians. The survey asked whether
efficacy requirements should be imposed on off-label uses; almost all
physicians said no. It asked whether the
efficacy requirements for initial uses should be dropped,
and most physicians said no. We then asked
respondents whether opposing
efficacy requirements in one case but not the other involved an
inconsistency. In response, we received
hundreds of written commentaries. We
organize
and discuss these commentaries with an eye to understanding how the
medical
market certifies off-label drug uses and how this compares to FDA
certification. Does off-label medicine
suggest that efficacy
requirements should be placed on new uses of old drugs?
Does it suggest that efficacy requirements on
new drugs should be lifted?