
Anup MalaniUniversity of Chicago | UC
Anup Malani
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146
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (146)
This paper introduces CASESUMM, a novel dataset for long-context summarization in the legal domain that addresses the need for longer and more complex datasets for summarization evaluation. We collect 25.6K U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) opinions and their official summaries, known as "syllabuses." Our dataset is the largest open legal case summarizat...
This paper introduces CaseSumm, a novel dataset for long-context summarization in the legal domain that addresses the need for longer and more complex datasets for summarization evaluation. We collect 25.6K U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) opinions and their official summaries, known as "syllabuses." Our dataset is the largest open legal case summarizat...
The COVID‐19 infection fatality rate (IFR) is the proportion of individuals infected with SARS‐CoV‐2 who subsequently die. As COVID‐19 disproportionately affects older individuals, age‐specific IFR estimates are imperative to facilitate comparisons of the impact of COVID‐19 between locations and prioritize distribution of scarce resources. However,...
In evolutionary ecology, two classes of explanations are frequently invoked to explain "early life effects" on adult outcomes. Developmental constraints (DC) explanations contend that costs of early adversity arise from limitations adversity places on optimal development. Adaptive response (AR) hypotheses propose that later life outcomes will be wo...
Two types of immunity, humoral and cellular, offer protection against COVID. Humoral protection, contributed by circulating neutralizing antibodies, can provide immediate protection but decays more quickly than cellular immunity and can lose effectiveness in the face of mutation and drift in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Therefore, population-level...
This study employs repeated, large panels of serological surveys to document rapid and substantial waning of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies at the population level and to calculate the extent to which infection and vaccination separately contribute to seroprevalence estimates. Four rounds of serological surveys were conducted, spanning two COVID waves (Octo...
Two types of immunity, humoral and cellular, offer protection against COVID. Humoral protection, contributed by circulating neutralizing antibodies, can provide immediate protection but decays more quickly than cellular immunity and can lose effectiveness in the face of mutation and drift in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Therefore, population-level...
The COVID-19 infection fatality rate (IFR) is the proportion of individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 who subsequently die. As COVID-19 disproportionately affects older individuals, age-specific IFR estimates are imperative to facilitate comparisons of the impact of COVID-19 between locations and prioritize distribution of scare resources. However,...
In many species, individuals that experience harsh conditions during development have poor health and fitness outcomes in adulthood, compared with peers that do not. These early-life contributions to inequality are often attributed to two classes of evolutionary hypotheses: Developmental Constraints (DC) models, which focus on the deleterious effec...
Four rounds of serological surveys were conducted, spanning two COVID waves (October 2020 and April-May 2021), in Tamil Nadu (population 72 million) state in India. Each round included representative populations in each district of the state, totaling ≥20,000 persons per round. State-level seroprevalence was 31.5% in round 1 (October-November 2020)...
Background:
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to be a major global public health crisis that exacts significant human and economic costs. Booster vaccination of individuals can improve waning immunity and reduce the impact of community epidemics.
Methods:
Using an epidemiological model that incorporates population-level severe acute...
This article examines the implications of Distributed Ledger Technology (a.k.a. blockchain) for several areas of law. While cryptocurrencies have received much attention, the implications of DLT are potentially far reaching. DLT raises interesting and important questions relating to rules of evidence, surrounding issues like hearsay and authenticat...
Official statistics on deaths from COVID undercount deaths due to lack of testing. In developed countries, death registries are used to estimate excess deaths due to COVID during the pandemic. However, few developing countries had complete death registries even before the pandemic and the pandemic further stressed administrative capacities. As a su...
Two‐stage randomized experiments are becoming an increasingly popular experimental design for causal inference when the outcome of one unit may be affected by the treatment assignments of other units in the same cluster. In this paper, we provide a methodological framework for general tools of statistical inference and power analysis for two‐stage...
Given global Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine shortages and inequity of vaccine distributions, fractionation of vaccine doses might be an effective strategy for reducing public health and economic burden, notwithstanding the emergence of new variants of concern. In this study, we developed a multi-scale model incorporating population-lev...
Introduction
The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 has been carefully measured and analysed in high-income countries, whereas there has been no systematic analysis of age-specific seroprevalence or IFR for developing countries.
Methods
We systematically reviewed the literature to identify all COVID-19 serology studies in developing countri...
Blockchain technology offers firms a novel method of raising capital via so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs). In the most common form of an ICO, a firm creates digital assets called “utility tokens” that are tracked on a blockchain-based ledger, requires that its product be purchased only with those tokens, and then, raises capital by selling t...
Early life conditions can have profound effects on individual health, longevity, and biological fitness. Two classes of hypotheses are used to explain the evolutionary origins of these effects: developmental constraints (DC) hypotheses, which focus on the deleterious effects of low-quality early-life environments, and predictive adaptive response (...
A vexing problem in contract law is modification. Two parties sign a contract but before they fully perform, they modify the contract. Should courts enforce the modified agreement? A private remedy is for the parties to write a contract that is robust to hold-up or that makes the facts relevant to modification verifiable. Provisions accomplishing t...
Four rounds of serological surveys were conducted, spanning two COVID waves (October 2020 and April-May 2021), in Tamil Nadu (population 72 million) state in India. Each round included representative populations in each district of the state, totaling ≥20,000 persons per round. State-level seroprevalence was 31.5% in round 1 (October-November 2020)...
Introduction
The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 has been carefully measured and analyzed in high-income countries, whereas there has been no systematic analysis of age-specific seroprevalence or IFR for developing countries. Indeed, it has been suggested that the death rate in developing countries may be far lower than in high-income cou...
Objectives
To estimate age-specific and sex-specific mortality risk among all SARS-CoV-2 infections in four settings in India, a major lower-middle-income country and to compare age trends in mortality with similar estimates in high-income countries.
Design
Cross-sectional study.
Setting
India, multiple regions representing combined population >1...
Although vaccines against antigenically evolving pathogens such as seasonal influenza ; and are designed to protect against circulating strains by affecting the emergence and transmission of antigenically divergent strains, they might in theory also be able to change the rate of antigenic evolution. Vaccination might slow antigenic evolution by inc...
Given constrained vaccine supplies globally, fractionation of vaccine doses may be an effective strategy for reducing disease and healthcare burdens, even with the emergence of COVID-19 variants. Using a multi-scale model that incorporates population-level transmission and individual-level vaccination, we estimate the costs associated with hospital...
We estimate excess deaths in India during the COVID pandemic using monthly deaths in the sample of a privately-conducted, nationally-representative, large, panel data set. The data set includes roughly 174,000 households (1.2 million members) and spans January 2015 - June 2021. We estimate COVID is associated with 3.36 million (95% CI: 2.08-4.63 mi...
This study is among the first to investigate whether patterns of access to basic services could explain the disproportionately severe impact of COVID-19 in slums. Using geolocated containment zones and COVID-19 case data for Mumbai, India’s most populous city, we find that cases and case fatality rates are higher in slums compared to formal residen...
SARS-CoV-2 has had a greater burden, as measured by rate of infection, in poorer communities within cities. For example, 55% of Mumbai slums residents had antibodies to COVID-19, 3.2 times the seroprevalence in non-slum areas of the city according to a sero-survey done in July 2020. One explanation is that government suppression was less severe in...
A population-representative serological study was conducted in all districts of the state of Tamil Nadu (population 72 million), India, in October-November 2020. State-level seroprevalence was 31.6%. However, this masks substantial variation across the state. Seroprevalence ranged from just 11.1% in The Nilgris to 51.0% in Perambalur district. Sero...
In the context of large numbers of workers moving from urban to rural areas with less strict lockdown policies in low- and middle-income countries, this study describes community-based severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) prevalence in urban vs rural areas of Karnataka state, India.
There are very few estimates of the age-specific infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 in low- and middle-income countries. India reports the second highest number of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the world. We estimate age-specific IFR using data from seroprevalence surveys in Mumbai (population 12 million) and Karnataka (population 61 million),...
Footnotes
We explain a surprising effect of tort liability in the market for prescription drugs. Greater punitive damage risk seems to increase prescription drug utilization in states without non-economic damage caps but decrease utilization in states with such caps. We offer an explanation for this puzzle. The vertical production process for drugs...
Although the vast majority of confirmed cases of COVID-19 are in low- and middle-income countries, there are relatively few published studies on the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 in these countries. The few there are focus on disease prevalence in urban areas. We conducted state-wide surveillance for COVID-19, in both rural and urban areas of Karnatak...
Objective: Estimate seroprevalence in representative samples from slum and non-slum communities in Mumbai, India, a mega-city in a low or middle-income country and test if prevalence is different in slums.
Design: After geographically-spaced community sampling of households, one individual per household was tested for IgG antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 N...
India has reported the fourth highest number of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases worldwide. Because there is little community testing for COVID, this case count is likely an underestimate. When India partially exited from lockdown on May 4, 2020, millions of daily laborers left cities for their rural family homes. RNA testing on a near-random sample of l...
In many social science experiments, subjects often interact with each other and as a result one unit’s treatment influences the outcome of another unit. Over the last decade, a significant progress has been made towards causal inference in the presence of such interference between units. Researchers have shown that the two-stage randomization of tr...
Although vaccines against seasonal influenza are designed to protect against circulating strains, by affecting the emergence and transmission of antigenically divergent strains, they might also change the rate of antigenic evolution. Vaccination might slow antigenic evolution by increasing immunity, reducing the chance that even antigenically diver...
More than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, health care for racial and ethnic minorities remains in many ways separate and unequal in the United States. Moreover, efforts to improve minority health care face challenges that differ from those confronted during de jure segregation. We review these challenges and examine w...
Legal scholars, lawyers, and judges frequently make positive claims about the state of legal doctrine. Yet despite the profligate citation norms of legal writing these claims are often supported in a somewhat imprecise way-such that the exact evidence is unclear or difficult for others to probe or falsify. In response to similar issues, other disci...
Economists think of medical innovation as a valuable but risky good, producing health benefits but increasing financial risk for consumers and healthcare payers. This perspective overlooks how innovation can lower physical risks borne by healthy patients facing the prospect of future disease. We present an alternative framework that accounts for al...
Medical research and development (R&D) differs from other R&D because of a unique linkage between output and input markets for medical products: potential consumers of existing medical products are also potential subjects in clinical trials required to develop new products. Therefore, an increase in the quality or reduction in the price of an exist...
Health care expenditure in the United States has grown rapidly, exceeding the annual growth in GDP by 2.5% since 1960. This rise has strained budgets and is the focus of the current national debate over health reform. Conventional wisdom holds that the primary driver of cost growth is medical innovation. This chapter examines how the expansion of h...
In this review the existing evidence on the impact of Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) is discussed in the context of international literature available on health insurance. We describe potential pathways through which health insurance can affect health and economic outcomes, discuss evidence from other developing countries, and identify poten...
While conducting empirical work, researchers sometimes observe changes in outcomes before adoption of a new policy. The conventional diagnosis is that treatment is endogenous. This observation is also consistent, however, with anticipation effects that arise naturally out of many theoretical models. This paper illustrates that distinguishing endoge...
SARS struck Taiwan in 2003, causing a national crisis. Many people feared that SARS would spread through the health care system, and outpatient visits fell by more than 30% in the course of a few weeks. We examine how both public information and the behavior and opinions of peers contributed to this reaction. We identify a peer effect through a dif...
Countries face conflicting incentives to report infectious disease outbreaks. Reports of outbreaks can prompt other countries to impose trade and travel restrictions, which has the potential to discourage reporting. However, reports can also bring medical assistance to contain the outbreak, including access to vaccines.
We compiled data on reports...
Legal and economic scholarship generally assumes that people weigh costs and benefits in responding to legal rules. This same scholarship often assumes, however, that trial judges applying the law do not compare the costs and benefits of their own effort when implementing legal rules. Consideration of trial court effort results in the so-called enf...
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is often controlled through culling of poultry. Compensating farmers for culled chickens or ducks facilitates effective culling and control of HPAI. However, ensuing price shifts can create incentives that alter the disease dynamics of HPAI. Farmers control certain aspects of the dynamics by setting a farm s...
We conducted randomized clinical trials to examine the impact of direct-to-consumer advertisements on the efficacy of a branded drug. We compared the objectively measured, physiological effect of Claritin (Merck & Co.), a leading antihistamine medication, across subjects randomized to watch a movie spliced with advertisements for Claritin or advert...
This article presents an empirical study of statutory interpretation. Respondents were asked to read statutes and answer questions about how they should be applied to simple cases. The results suggest, first, that it is difficult to separate judgments about the linguistic meaning of a statute from policy preferences about it. Different ways of fram...
Defendants in patent infringement cases are permitted to defend on the grounds that the infringed upon patent is invalid. This defense, which we call a patent challenge, is intended to correct for the fact that the Patent and Trademark Office may grant patents that are invalid, and invalid patents impose significant economic costs without the offse...
People often behave in ways that are clearly detrimental to their health. We review representative research on unhealthy behaviors within a parsimonious frame-work, the Hot-Cold Decision Triangle. Through this framework, we describe how when people embrace colder state reasoning—instead of risking the pitfalls of heuristics and visceral reactions—t...
This article synthesizes and extends, in a nontechnical manner, recent research on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The aim is to shed light on whether the policies of the agency itself are safe and effective when measured in terms of economic efficiency. The first section provides an overview of the role of the FDA in regulating pharmaceuti...
Defendants in patent infringement cases are permitted to defend on the grounds that the infringed upon patent is invalid. This defense, which we call a patent challenge, is intended to correct the problem that the Patent and Trademark Office may grant patents that are invalid and invalid patents impose deadweight loss without the offsetting benefit...
Both asset ownership and contracts play important roles in providing incentives for relationship specific investments, and hence in determining the boundary of the firm. Significant progress has been made in understanding the roles that these instruments play, but largely in isolation from each other. We provide a framework for understanding when a...
The FDA employs an average-patient standard when reviewing drugs: it approves a drug only if is safe and effective for the average patient in a clinical trial. It is common, however, for patients to respond differently to a drug. Therefore, the average-patient standard can reject a drug that benefits certain patient subgroups (false negatives) and...
Infectious diseases remain a central preoccupation in many countries. This article sets out the economic issues that arise in this highly complex domain. It reviews four main strands of literature on the economics of infectious diseases. It discusses the economic impact of infectious diseases on labor productivity and investment decisions. It focus...
People often behave in ways that are clearly detrimental to their health. We review representative research on unhealthy behaviors within a parsimonious framework, the Hot-Cold Decision Triangle. Through this framework, we describe how when people embrace colder state reasoning—instead of risking the pitfalls of heuristics and visceral reactions—th...
The FDA employs an average-patient standard when reviewing drugs: it approves a drug only if is safe and effective for the average patient in a clinical trial. It is common, however, for patients to respond differently to a drug. Therefore, the average-patient standard can reject a drug that benefits certain patient subgroups (false negative) and e...
What role do policy preferences play when a judge or any other reader decides what a statute or other legal text means? Most judges think of themselves as doing law, not politics. Yet the observable decisions that judges make often follow patterns that are hard to explain by anything other than policy preferences. Indeed, if one presses the implica...
Nearly all the empirical literature on tort liability in the healthcare sector focuses on physicians. Yet both drug companies and physicians lose roughly the same portion of revenue (2 percent) to liability expenses.Moreover, the health care system’s expenditures on drugs are rising nearly twice as fast as expenditures on physician and hospital car...
We develop a model where products liability trials provide information to consumers who are not parties to the litigation. Consumers use this information to take precautions against dangerous products. A critical assumption is that consumers cannot differentiate between firms that have never been sued and firms that have been sued but settled out o...
There is considerable debate about the impact of health care reform on the growth in medical spending. Medical innovation is thought to be a central contributor to that growth. We argue that there is a unique linkage between reforms that affect output markets for medical care and medical R&D costs. This linkage is due to the fact that potential con...
The global spread of diseases such as swine flu and SARS highlights the difficult decision governments face when presented with evidence of a local outbreak. Reporting the outbreak may bring medical assistance but is also likely to trigger trade sanctions by countries hoping to contain the disease. Suppressing the information may avoid trade sancti...
While conducting empirical work, researchers sometimes observe changes in outcomes before adoption of a new treatment program. The conventional diagnosis is that treatment is endogenous. Observing changes in outcomes prior to treatment is also consistent, however, with anticipation effects. This paper provides a framework for comparing the differen...