Introduction.

• Author: Bradford, W. David
• Position: Health economics

Since the publication of Kenneth Arrow's seminal paper on the role of uncertainty in health care decision making (Arrow 1963), the field of health economics has matured into a distinct sub-field of economics. The health care sector constitutes nearly one-eighth of the entire U.S. economy--making the study of health economics (as a sub-discipline of industrial organization) important by the sheer magnitude of the resources it consumes. However, the fact that health care decisions are made in a world with interesting and significant theoretical complications--moral hazard, adverse selection, asymmetric information, fractured agency relationships, and ubiquitous regulatory intrusions to name only a re--raises the field to one of true foundational importance. As a result, health economics continues to command a presence not only in a growing cadre of high-quality field journals, but also in the best general-interest economics journals.

In addition, a growing number of health economics-related conferences have been expanding in all venues, from large international (the biannual International Health Economics Association World Congress) and national conferences (the biannual American Society of Health Economists Conference), to smaller invitational conferences at the national (the Annual Health Economics Conference) and regional levels. These latter formats typically consist of hour-long presentations and discussions of 10-12 papers over a two-day period with 30-40 select attendees. The goals of these highly selective meetings are to not only present the best research, but also to encourage collaborations between researchers with different levels of experience. This issue of the Southern Economic Journal contains a symposium of selected papers from one of the most established of the regional conferences--the Southeastern Health Economics Study Group (SHESG).

The SHESG was inaugurated by the Center for Health Economic and Policy Studies at the Medical University of South Carolina in 2003; the second meeting was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The papers in this symposium are taken from the Third Annual SHESG, which was hosted by the Department of Economics at the University of South Carolina in the fall of 2005 (Melayne McInnes was the primary conference organizer). Papers presented at that conference encompassed a wide range of methods--both theoretical and empirical--and topics. Four papers were selected for inclusion in this...