Conventional wisdom suggests that CEO membership of the compensation committee is an open invitation to rent extraction by self-serving executives. However, using data from New Zealand – where CEO compensation committee membership is relatively common – we find that annual pay increments for CEOs with this apparent advantage averaged six percentage points less than those enjoyed by other CEOs d...

BACKGROUND Cancer epidemiology has been criticized for producing false-positive associations. The present analysis investigates the frequency of and factors contributing to false-positive findings in cancer epidemiology. METHODS The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs Group 3 agents were examined to identify potential false-positive findings. Frequency estimates for ...

BACKGROUND Several statistical approaches have been proposed to assess and correct for exposure measurement error. We aimed to provide a critical overview of the most common approaches used in nutritional epidemiology. METHODS MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIOSIS and CINAHL were searched for reports published in English up to May 2016 in order to ascertain studies that described methods aimed to quantify ...

In Belgium, welfare agencies receive a subsidy to employ welfare recipients for a period sufficiently long to entitle them to unemployment benefits. This work experience program is called Social Employment (SE). We investigate the effect of SE on the exit rate from welfare. We propose a grouping/IV estimator of the SE effect that eliminates selection bias. The estimator is consistent, even if t...

Background Standardized selection of outcomes has been advocated to allow comparison and syntheses of clinical trials’ results in systematic reviews and to avoid outcome selection bias. As health outcomes in children are different from adults, the methodology behind selecting and measuring outcomes should be valid, responsive and feasible for pediatric research. Core Outcome Sets (COS) are a ne...

The issue of what exactly are the limits of epidemiology is now on the radar screen of the entire field. Shapiro (1) has added his thoughts to the public discussion by describing a sensitivity analysis of reported associations between oral contraceptive use and breast cancer. He addresses diagnostic selection bias and information bias as possible explanations for small relative risks, demonstra...

BACKGROUND Aspirin has been considered to be beneficial in preventing cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Several pharmaco-epidemiology cohort studies have shown protective effects of aspirin on diseases using various statistical methods, with the Cox regression model being the most commonly used approach. However, there are some inherent limitations to the conventional Cox regression approach ...

In a 1993 paper (Am J Epidemiol. 1993;137(1):1-8), Weinberg considered whether a variable that is associated with the outcome and is affected by exposure but is not an intermediate variable between exposure and outcome should be considered a confounder in etiologic studies. As an example, she examined the common practice of adjusting for history of spontaneous abortion when estimating the effec...

Large (observational) data sets typically present research opportunities, but also problems that can lead to false claims. In Big Data, the standard error of an average effect estimate goes to zero as sample size increases, so even small biases can lead to declared (but false) claims. In addition, the average of a treatment difference, a so called main effect, can be almost meaningless when the...

BACKGROUND The performance of creatinine-based glomerular filtration rate (GFR) estimating equations may vary in subgroups defined by GFR, age and body mass index (BMI). This study compares the performance of the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) study and Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) equations with the revised Lund-Malmö equation (LM Revised), a new eq...