Pharmaceutical spending and health outcomes in the united states

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Abstract
Although previous studies have attempted to isolate the effect of pharmaceutical spending on health outcomes, most have been limited by analysis of inherently heterogeneous inter-country data. This study focuses on one particular health outcome — infant mortality at the state level in the U.S. — and shows that its important determinants include: (1) pharmaceutical expenditures; (2) health economic infrastructure (e.g. number of practicing physicians, number of hospital beds); (3) socio-demographics (e.g. teenage birth rate, low-weight births, high school graduation rate, racial composition of state population); and (4) state-level economic aggregates (e.g. a disposable income, percent of population below the poverty line).