Using PowerPoint to Think
and Write Health Economics
Allen C. Goodman
iHEA World Congress
Milano – July 2015
Student Experience
Students often come to both undergraduate and graduate
economics courses with little or no experience in writing
economics …
Often little experience in any sort of scholarly writing
– and they detest outlining anything.
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All of these can be done as PP presentations
• It makes students synopsize what they want to do.
• It makes students write it down.
• It makes it easy for them to organize … and re-organize …
and re-organize again.
• Makes it easy for students to provide intermediate output –
in the consulting vernacular, “deliverables.”
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Tool = PowerPoint
• For outlines, data organization, and at the end of the
process, presentation, provides a helpful way for students
to
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
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start the process,
provide early output for instructional review,
organize data, diagrams, maps, and/or tables,
“fill in the blanks” as they write,
and then … present the results
4
Simple Example
• Determinants of National Health Expenditures
• Easy to do with OECD Health Data
• As simple as Expenditures/person = a + b GDP/person,
for a single country
• Can be more complicated (more countries, more
variables)
• Can have more complicated econometrics (cointegration
analysis).
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1. What should I do? – 5 slides
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Title (it’s amazing how many are entitled “presentation”).
Null and alternative hypotheses
Database
Variables to use
One slide list of references (maybe 5)
a. Wikipedia is not a scholarly reference
b. FGS/7 is not a scholarly reference.
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2. Early output - Reading
• Structure the reading
• Think of this like a chemistry
or a physics experiment
•
•
•
•
•
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Aim
Equipment
Procedure
Results
Interpretation
• Here
• Economics analogy
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Aim
Approach
Database
Findings
Meaning
What did you like?
What didn’t you like?
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Spreadsheet Format
Title
Journal
Aim
Approach Database
Findings
Meaning
Like?
Dislike?
Many journals accept (PREFER) this as a literature review
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3. Data, Diagrams, Maps, or Tables
Health Expenditures and GDP Per Capita – 1960 - 2008
GDP
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Expenditures
Mean
Median
Mean
Median
Canada
15778
14489
1516
1259
Italy
13897
12518
2013
1885
UK
14242
11590
1047
689
US
18862
16539
2647
1811
9
Summary Regression – UK – Log-Log
SUMMARY OUTPUT - UK
Regression Statistics
Multiple R
0.999099
R Square
0.998199
Adjusted R Square
0.99816
Standard Error 0.02122
Observations
49
ANOVA
df
Regression
Residual
Total
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Intercept
GDP
SS
MS
F
1 11.72687 11.72687 26042.66
47 0.021164 0.00045
48 11.74803
Coefficients
Standard Error t Stat
P-value
-2.22412 0.030938 -71.8896 1.01E-49
10
1.246471 0.007724 161.3774 3.73E-66
Summary Regression – US – Log-Log
SUMMARY OUTPUT - US
Regression Statistics
Multiple R
0.999487
R Square
0.998975
Adjusted R Square
0.998953
Standard Error 0.017721
Observations
49
ANOVA
df
Regression
Residual
Total
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Intercept
GDP
SS
MS
F
1 14.38352 14.38352 45803.26
47 0.014759 0.000314
48 14.39828
Coefficients
Standard Error t Stat
P-value
-2.66021 0.027116 -98.1034 5.01E-56
1.399581 0.00654 214.017 6.55E-72 11
4. Write– UK – Log-Log
SUMMARY OUTPUT - UK
R-squared is over 0.99 – pretty
good
Elasticity is 1.25
Regression Statistics
Multiple R
0.999099
R Square
0.998199
Adjusted R Square
0.99816
Standard Error 0.02122
Observations
49
ANOVA
df
Regression
Residual
Total
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Intercept
GDP
SS
MS
F
1 11.72687 11.72687 26042.66
47 0.021164 0.00045
48 11.74803
Coefficients
Standard Error t Stat
P-value
-2.22412 0.030938 -71.8896 1.01E-49
12
1.246471 0.007724 161.3774 3.73E-66
Write – US – Log-Log
SUMMARY OUTPUT - US
R-squared is over 0.99 – pretty
good
Elasticity is 1.40
US elasticity > UK elasticity
Regression Statistics
Multiple R
0.999487
R Square
0.998975
Adjusted R Square
0.998953
Standard Error 0.017721
Observations
49
ANOVA
df
Graph?
Put in
same
table?
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Regression
Residual
Total
Intercept
GDP
SS
MS
F
1 14.38352 14.38352 45803.26
47 0.014759 0.000314
48 14.39828
Coefficients
Standard Error t Stat
P-value
-2.66021 0.027116 -98.1034 5.01E-56
1.399581 0.00654 214.017 6.55E-72 13
5. Finish the paper
• Do I need more analyses? – Put them in the right place.
• Do I have to read something else – Put that in the right
place.
• Am I much more organized? We hope so.
• If you are writing in MS Word, you can just cut and paste
the tables, graphs, references.
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Arrière Pensées
• This is obviously an undergraduate example. It can also work at the
graduate level, often topic by topic or chapter by chapter.
• Graduate students (and advisers) are often frustrated by lack of
progress or talking past each other.
• Often when a student will come in with an idea, I’ll say, “write me a
10 slide PowerPoint.”
• They have to organize
• They have to figure out what is important
• They have to figure out how to present the key ideas rather than simply
writing them down.
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Autres Arrière Pensées
• On occasion, I’ve dispensed with the paper entirely, and asked for a
complete set of PP slides.
• This depends on the motives for the research. It won’t work if you
view it as important to concentrate on grammar.
• Insist that students avoid MASSIVE “cut and pastes”. This is
equivalent to stringing along paragraph-long quotes in a paper …
and just as bad.
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So …
• Rather than being the last thing that students do,
PowerPoint can help from the start.
• Outline
• Organize
• Rearrange
• Summarize
• … and finally
• Present
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