Bounds in competing risks models and the war on cancer
By: Bo E. Honore, Adriana Lleras Muney.
Contributors: Lleras Muney, Adriana, 1974-; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 10963; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 10963.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Cancer -- Mortality -- Mathematical models.; Cardiovascular system -- Diseases -- Mortality -- Mathematical models.
Description: "In 1971 President Nixon declared war on cancer and increased the federal funds allocated to cancer research dramatically.  Thirty years later, many have declared this war a failure.  Overall cancer statistics confirm this view: age-adjusted mortality in 2000 was essentially unchanged from the early 1970s.  At the same time, age-adjusted mortality rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen quite dramatically.  Since the causes underlying cancer and cardiovascular disease are likely to be correlated, the decline in mortality rates from cardiovascular disease may be somewhat responsible for the rise in cancer mortality.  It is natural to model mortality with more than one cause of death as a competing risks model.  Such models are fundamentally unidentified, and it is therefore difficult to get a clear picture of the progress in cancer.  This paper derives bounds for aspects of the underlying distributions under a number of different assumptions.  Most importantly, we do not assume that the underlying risks are independent, and impose weak parametric assumptions in order to obtain identification.  The theoretical contribution of the paper is to provide a framework to estimate competing risk models with interval data and discrete explanatory variables, both of which are common in empirical applications.  We use our method to estimate changes in cancer and cardiovascular mortality since 1970.  The estimated bounds for the effect of time on the duration until death for either cause are fairly tight and we find that trends in cancer show much larger improvements than previously estimated.  For example, we find that time until death from cancer increased by about 10% for white males and 20% for white women"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
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