wages and work conditions as determinants for physicians work decisions it is not uncommon that publicly employed physicians also have income from work outside the hospital sometimes termed moonlighting there is little empirical evidence of such activity in this article we investigate which factors that may influence physicians choice of work between the public hospital sector and elsewhere an exceptionally high wage increase in 1996 for one group of hospital physicians physician assistants serves as a natural experiment and we analyse whether wages in general and this reform in particular have affected physicians external earnings for physician assistants we find that higher wages at public hospitals affect negatively both the decisions to earn income externally and level of income once active for chief physicians on the other hand there was no such response to the wage increase several hospital specific factors representing job specific work characteristics also matter for physicians decisions to earn income externally

the growing supply of physicians has the market become more competitive the stock of u s physicians at any point in time is modeled as a weighted average of the supply that a perfect cartel would produce and that would prevail under perfect competition estimation of a system of stock and income equations over the post world war ii period shows that after holding constant demand and marginal cost conditions and accounting for gradual adjustment to changes in equilibrium the weighting parameter has moved toward the competitive extreme since 1965 this rise in the degree of competition is estimated to have increased physician stock by 6 20 and concomitantly decreased medical incomes by 19 45

efficiency and equalization payments in a federal system of government a synthesis and extensions of recent results this paper investigates the rationale for a system of equalization transfers in a federal system of government the existing sources of inefficiency of resource allocation in economies with more than one level of government are synthesized in the framework of a simple decentralized multiprovince model with mobile factors of production the sources of inefficiency arise first because migrants respond at the margin to incorrect signals owing to the phenomena of rent sharing and fiscal exterality and second because of global rather than local inefficiencies the model is then extended to consider the role of the federal government in providing intergovernmental transfers in the face of such inefficiencies in addition to synthesizing the sources of inefficiency in federal models the equity arguments for equalization are briefly recounted efficacite et paiements de perequation dans un systeme federal de gouvernement synthese et extensions de certains resultats recents ce memoire examine la logique qui soustend un systeme de paiements de perequation dans un systeme fdderal de gouverement les auteurs utilisent un modele simple d un systeme multi provincial decentralise avec des facteurs de production mobiles pour definir les sources d inefficacite dans l allocation des ressources dans les dconomies qui possedent plus d un niveau de gouvernement ces inefficacites proviennent de ce que d abord ceux qui se deplacent le font en reponse a la marge a des signaux incorrects engendres par le partage de la rente sur la base de la residence et par les phenomenes d exteralites fiscales elles sont aussi le resultat d inefficacites globales plutot que locales dans le cadre de ce modele les auteurs analysent le role du gouvernement federal effectuant des transferts inter gouverementaux pour corriger ces inefficacites en plus de presenter une synthese des sources d inefficacite dans les regimes federaux les auteurs font un bref rappel en passant a l ensemble des arguments fondes sur l equite qu on utilise pour rationaliser les paiements de perequation this paper is a linear combination of two papers presented at the may 1982 meetings of the canadian economics association in halifax entitled the case for equalization payments by the authors and recent developments in the theory of regional economic policy in canada by boadway the authors are grateful for comments by the discussants jim johnson and baxter macdonald and by jack mintz brian scarfe gerard belanger david sewell tom courchene and the referees we are especially heavily indebted to dan usher for many stimulating comments and suggestions while the work was in progress some of the above persons will undoubtedly disagree with the emphasis we have chosen to put on various aspects of the analysis for policy purposes support for some of this work has been provided by the economic council of canada and is gratefully acknowledged canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xv no 4 november novembre 1982 printed in canada imprimd au canada 0008 4085 82 0000 0613 01 50 1982 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 207 46 13 127 on wed 12 oct 2016 04 27 47 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms 614 robin boadway and frank flatters

utility maximization individual production and market equilibrium the theory of the utility maximizing owner operator firm has been well known for years because of income effects the firm s short run product supply curve can be negatively sloped and its input demand curve may be positively sloped what is not well known is whether these results hold for the industry in the long run with entry the answer to this question has serious policy implications consider for example the physicians services sector in the early 1960s 70 percent of physicians were practicing solo there was an excess demand for physician services and the ama was pretty much acting as a cartel through a variety of policies the federal government 1 increased the demand for medical services 2 induced medical schools to double their capacity in a decade and 3 heavily subsidized education entry costs for new doctors health policymakers were amazed to observe that during the 1970s the price of physician services rose faster than the overall cpi moreover the number of patients seen per week per physician fell during this period one reaction to this set of events was that due to asymetrical information physicians must have been inducing increases in the demand for their services we show that under increasing factor costs reductions in entry costs can lead to increases in market price this finding is not possible to reach by looking at the short run theory of the firm alone in addition the result does not require a negative sloped product supply curve or similar perverse results there are many other sectors primarily comprised of small firms that are owned and operated by the same individual farming homebuilding restaurants small stores hairdressers travel agencies and consulting firms many of these sectors have obtained special tax breaks and subsidies from the federal government to encourage increases in supply using the standard theory of the firm these policies seem plausible in both the short and long run in this paper we demonstrate that the efficacy of such policies are questionable when one considers the special nature of these firms in the long run the literature on the utility maximizing owner operator began with scitovsky 13 who argued that utility and profit maximization may not be equivalent in the short run in the most

taxes and labor supply of high income physicians abstract we use the 1983 1985 physicians practice costs and income survey supplemented with federal and state tax rates to estimate the effect of variation in marginal tax rates on work hours for high income physicians we find that self employed physicians are much more sensitive to the marginal tax rate than would be suggested by previous labor supply studies while those who are employees have no discernible sensitivity to marginal tax rates

interprovincial migration and local public goods the objective of this paper is to test whether fiscally induced migration occurs in canada that is whether interprovincial migration flows are influenced by government tax and expenditure policies in order to do so a multinominal logit model of migration is developed in which individuals choose to live in the province where their utility would be highest the model is estimated using aggregate data for the period 1962 81 the results indicate that migration is influenced by provincial government spending trough the magnitude and direction of the effect differs with the type of government spending the implication of these results is that intergovernmental transfer payments and provincial natural resource revenues also have the potential to influence migration flows in canada summary in fre excerpt

price adjustment in the hospital sector we analyse the properties of optimal price adjustment to hospitals when no lump sum transfers are allowed and when prices differ to reflect observable exogenous differences in costs we find that a when the marginal benefit from treatment is decreasing and the cost function is the power function price adjustment for hospitals with higher costs is positive but partial if the marginal benefit is constant the price is identical across providers b if the cost function is exponential or it is separable in monetary and non monetary costs and linear in monetary costs price adjustment is positive even when the marginal benefit is constant c higher inequality aversion of the purchaser increases concentration in prices and lowers concentration in quantities d if some dimensions of costs are private information a higher correlation between the observable and unobservable cost component increases the optimal price for providers whose observable costs are above the average

estimating the choice behavior of self employed business proprietors an application to dairy farmers the vast majority of business concerns operating in contemporary market oriented economies are owned and controlled by a single individual and perhaps family members yet little work has been performed in the area of estimating the choice behavior of self employed business proprietors particularly under conditions where production and consumption decisions are interdependent lau lin and yotopolous 16 barnum and squire 2 and others have developed models to analyze and estimate the complete choice behavior of farm households in developing nations these analyses invariably separate production and consumption decisions so that the sole link between the two sides of the model lies in the impact of farm profit on the household budget constraint this type of separability implicitly assumes the existence of perfect markets for all goods and inputs while this assumption may be a valid approximation for many farm households in developing economies it is not generally applicable to self employed proprietors especially those operating in more advanced economies 8 19 21 26 to my knowledge only two prior empirical studies have been performed which attempt to analyze the choice behavior of self employed business proprietors under conditions where production and consumption decisions are interdependent brown and lapan 4 employ aggregate u s time series data to estimate physician labor and output supply responses to changes in output price their estimation procedure centers on a single reduced form output supply equation parameter estimates are interpreted in the context of the theoretical framework assuming constant returns to scale technology and homothetic preferences they conclude that while the physician labor supply curve is backward bending the output supply curve is positively sloped lopez 19 formulates a model analyzing the interdependent production and labor supply decisions of households that own and operate a farm his framework integrates output input and labor supply choices and allows for differences in preferences between on farm and off farm work imposing constant returns to scale and using cross section canadian data aggregated by census division he jointly estimates output supply input demand on farm and off farm labor

micro estimates of public spending demand functions and tests of the tiebout and median voter hypotheses responses to questions given to a random sample of michigan households are used to estimate public spending demand functions while income and price elasticities are similar to those obtained from aggregate data positive income elasticities appear to arise because public services are distributed in a prorich manner a relatively small variance in spending demands among urban and suburban communities in metropolitan areas with substantial public service variety suggests that the tiebout mechanism works this interpretation is supported by the fact that actual spending conforms substantially to desired levels in urban areas but less so in rural areas with little public sector choice

the marginal welfare cost of public funds theory and estimates abstract we derive a general analytic formula for the marginal welfare cost mwc of public funds without imposing restrictive assumptions on preferences or technologies the framework encompasses the various special cases previously considered and reconciles the disparities among the reported estimates of mwc unresolved differences in existing estimates are fully explained by appropriate interpretations of intended thought experiments and alternative assumptions about the elasticity of labor supply with respect to public spending further progress in measuring mwc requires empirical estimation of labor supply functions that include government spending as an explanatory variable

the interprovincial migration of canadian physicians does income matter this study applies a multinomial logit model of human capital migration to examine the factors influencing the movement of physicians within canadian provinces between 1976 and 1992 the empirical investigation covers general practitioners and specialists it excludes interns residents between seven regions atlantic canada quebec ontario manitoba saskatchewan alberta and british columbia the results suggest that differences in real income have a positive and significant effect on a physician s decision to migrate form one province to another provinces with the highest after tax income highest expenditure per physician and highest fee per service rates have the highest net rate of in migration income differences are however not the only factor influencing a physician s choice to move working conditions within a province which we proxy with the number of hospitals beds and health expenditures per capita are also important factors likewise the ratio of rural to urban population distance b

the impact of medical malpractice insurance cost on physician behaviour the role of income and tort signal effects the paper examines the impact of medical malpractice insurance cost on physician behaviour changes in malpractice insurance premiums can potentially influence physician behaviour directly through income effects from changes in medical practice earnings and indirectly through tort signal effects that indicate exposure to malpractice risk a structural model of the physician firm is estimated to assess the significance magnitude and relative importance of income and tort signal effects of premium changes on physician time allocation and service supply using data on solo practice physicians evidence is found of both income and tort signal effects for primary care physicians and surgeons results also indicate that income effects have a relatively larger impact on measures of physician behaviour such as services provided and fees while tort signal effects which reflect defensive measures have a much smaller impact

hospital price regulation and expenditure cap policy abstract in several european countries governments have chosen to put a global budget cap on health care expenditure this paper analyzes the strategies of the providers facing this policy and evaluates its effects on provider and patient surplus we consider this policy when it is applied to local monopoly hospitals and when it is applied to hospitals playing as cournot competitors using a two stage model to characterize the optimal expenditure cap policy taking the hospitals optimal responses as given we prove that this policy induces a level of welfare lower than the first best outcome however we show that a second best outcome may be achieved under this policy when the number of hospitals becomes large

comparative statics for utility maximization models with nonlinear budget constraints this paper investigates the properties of demand functions generated by nonlinear budget constraints and relates them to those of demand functions generated by linear budget constraints the analysis shows that the properties of nonlinear and linear demand functions in some respects are similar but in other respects differ substantially the study gives conditions under which properties of the linear demand functions carry over to the nonlinear ones the implications for the nonlinear demand functions of various separability assumptions are also studied copyright 1989 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

parametric efficiency tests economies of scale and input demand in u s electric power generation duality theory has been applied increasingly in recent years to study the structure of production a major advantage of using duality theory is that systems of input demand equations can be derived by simple differentiation facilitating the use of flexible functional forms also use of duality theory makes it possible to choose a representation of the technology which has desirable properties for estimation such as exogeneity of the regressors however the use of a dual representation of production structure is appropriate only if the corresponding maintained hypothesis concerning economic behavior e g cost minimization or profit maximization is valid the perceived advantages of the dual approach to studying production structure have led to some applications in which the maintained hypothesis concerning economic behavior is unlikely to be appropriate for example neoclassical cost functions have been used to study the characteristics of production in regulated industries despite an extensive theoretical literature indicating that a profit maximizing regulated firm would not minimize costs subject to market prices 2 in this paper we propose a generalized cost function that retains the principal advantages of the neoclassical cost function but does not require that cost minimization subject to market prices be imposed as a maintained hypothesis in our model firms are assumed to base their production decisions on unobservable shadow prices which reflect the effects of regulation on the effective prices of inputs parametric tests for cost minimization are obtained by expressing shadow prices as functions of market prices the generalized cost function is estimated with data for regulated electric utilities the parametric restrictions corresponding to cost minimizing behavior subject to market prices are rejected implying that the use of a neoclassical cost function is not appropriate in this application 3

price adjustment in the hospital sector how should the nhs discriminate between providers a comment on miraldo siciliani and street miraldo et al 2011 have analyzed the price adjustment policy of a payer implementing a prospective payment system in the hospital sector in the presence of exogenous cost differences when no lump sum transfers are allowed they focus on deriving conditions for the price adjustment being positive in this paper using a result of miraldo et al we emphasize whether the price adjustment is larger or smaller than the marginal cost we show how the discrimination operates against either the low cost or the high cost hospitals according to the value of the elasticity of the additional marginal cost with respect to the quantity of services

a production function for physician services revisited we revisit reinhardt s 1972 commonly used production function for physician services this production function although appropriate in some settings is not adequate for more detailed studies the generalized linear production function diewart 1971 is an attractive alternative for this application it admits zero values for inputs and allows the estimation of complex technical relationships we find that from 1965 1988 the technical relationships that describe the production process for physician services are remarkably stable by empirically estimating the parameters of this more general production function we provide crucial evidence about the q complementarity of health worker inputs the first of its kind in the literature on health labor markets

estimating labor supply and production decisions of self employed farm producers abstract this paper proposes a model oriented towards integrating farm households production and consumption decisions into a unified theoretical and econometric framework it is argued that in contrast with other forms of economic organization farm households utility and profit maximization decisions are not likely to be independent econometric estimation of a farm household model using canadian data suggests that utility and profit maximizing decisions are not indeed independent and moreover that there are significant gains in explanatory power and efficiency by estimating the consumption and production equations jointly

trends and prospects in state and local finance abstract this article reviews trends in the national total of the expenditures of state and local governments for the period of 1929 1982 the principle conclusions are that growth of federal grants has played a significant role in the growth of these expenditures and that even after allowing for the effects of relative price income and federal grants a relatively large unexplained positive residual remains part of this upward drift in expenditures especially for the period of 1950 1970 can be accounted for by the growth in school age population the article ends with a brief discussion of future prospects for subnational governments

international aspects of merger policy a survey this paper surveys the literature on merger policy in open economies we first adopt a reduced form approach to derive general insights on the scope for conflict between national antitrust authorities and on the gains from international merger policy coordination taking trade costs as given we use standard oligopoly models to derive conditions on market structure under which underenforcement or overenforcement of national merger policies can arise we then study the interactions between merger policy and trade policy and find that trade liberalization often leads to stricter national merger policies we conclude by discussing empirical evidence on conflict between antitrust authorities

physician labor supply do income effects matter this paper estimates a model of physician labor supply focusing on the impacts of wage and non wage income we find evidence of significant income effects for male physicians the income effect of a wage change on labor supply is negative with an elasticity of 0 26 the pure substitution effect of a wage change increases labor supply a 1 increase in wages leads to a 0 49 increase in labor supply controlling for income effects the results also suggest that the labor supply decisions of females are more responsive to variations in their earnings than are those of males

virtual prices and a general theory of the owner operated firm theories of entrepreneurial behavior for owner operated firms have a long history in economics these models treat the owner operator as both a producer and consumer of goods production and consumption choices result from utility maximization a preponderance of the work performed in this area has addressed two theoretical issues the consistency of utility and profit maximization and comparative static behavior of the entrepreneur scitovszky s seminal paper 29 demonstrates that under certain circumstances the entrepreneur may trade off income for leisure giving rise to the possibility of income effects on production and inconsistency of utility and profit maximization building on scitovszky s work graaff 14 clower 6 auster and silver 3 and lapan and brown 18 analyze the comparative static behavior of the utility maximizing owner operator and how this differs from the traditional neoclassical profit maximizing firm emphasis is on the possibility of income effects on production and how they may result in seemingly uneconomic behavior a shortcoming of this literature is the focus on special cases based on strong restrictions on technology constant returns to scale and the market for the entrepreneurial input no such market exists as of yet a general analysis of the comparative static behavior of the entrepreneur has not been undertaken scitovszky s work also initiated a vigorous debate concerning the consistency of utility and profit maximization for owner operated firms this debate centers on two principal questions does utility maximization imply profit maximization if not can a utility maximizing owner operated firm survive through time piron 25 olsen 23 24 and hannon 15 conclude that in competitive long run equilibrium utility maximizing entrepreneurs necessarily maximize profit and must do so to remain viable ladd 17 auster and silver 3 feinberg 8 9 10 and schlesinger 28 conclude that utility and profit maximization may diverge moreover these writers maintain that non profit maximizing owner operated firms can survive through time more re

an equilibrium approach to international merger policy i treat international merger policy as a repeated veto game i show that there exists a unique efficient equilibrium within a particular class of trigger strategy equilibria i then consider a series of comparative statics and extensions a if for some exogenous reason one of the countries becomes more lenient towards mergers than the other country becomes more lenient as well b merger remedies increase the probability that a merger is approved and increase total welfare c the effects of a merger wave are magnified by the equilibrium approval policy d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved jel classification f0 l4

income segregation and local progressive taxation empirical evidence from switzerland this study investigates spatial income segregation in fiscally decentralized urban areas the theoretical part proposes the progressivity of local income taxes as a new theoretical explanation for income segregation the empirical part studies how income tax differentials across municipalities affect the households location decisions i use data from the swiss metropolitan area of basel that contains tax information on all moving households in 1997 the location choice of the households is investigated within the framework of the random utility maximization model different econometric specifications of the error term structure such as conditional logit nested logit and multinomial probit are compared the empirical results show that rich households are significantly and substantially more likely to move to low tax municipalities than poor households this result holds after controlling for alternative explanations of segregation social interactions and distance from the central business district are established as other major factors for income segregation households in general tend to choose locations close to other households like themselves

the effect of incentive policies on the practice location of doctors a multinomial probit analysis in this article we estimate a spatial autoregressive multinomial probit model of the choice of location by general practitioners for establishing their initial practice this model allows us to account for potential interdependencies among location choices the model is used to assess the effect of various incentive measures introduced in quebec canada to influence the geographical distribution of physicians across 18 regions our data set covers subperiods before and after the introduction of these measures incentive policies are captured through price and income effects our results provide evidence that these measures had a significant effect on location choices

the allocation of jurisdiction in international antitrust abstract in this paper we consider the organisation of international antitrust as an issue of institution design which involves a trade off between an inadequate internalisation of external effects across jurisdictions and the risk of capture in a centralised agency we focus on the first element of the trade off and on merger control we first point out that the current framework of public international law allows for wide discretion in the assertion of jurisdiction we then consider various allocations of jurisdictions in a stylised model of international merger control which attempts to capture the essential features of the objectives being pursued and of the procedures being implemented in the major jurisdictions we find that in this framework much of the scope for conflict disappears the fact that conflicts actually often arise in global industries must then be associated with the pursuit of objectives that antitrust authorities are not supposed to pursue we also find that the allocation of jurisdiction matters surprisingly little for the final outcome

the utility maximizing self employed physician we estimate a model of utility maximizing physician behavior our model accounts for the interdependence of physician input output and work leisure choices and includes an endogenous virtual wage for physician own time in the medical practice we find that solo practitioners respond to increases in marginal hourly earnings and nonpractice income by allocating less time to medical practice activities our results also suggest that fee reductions induce the substitution of physician own time for auxiliaries and the net effect of this adjustment is reduced patient loads and a decrease in supply from the existing stock of solo practitioners

the labour supply behaviour of self employed solo practice physicians this paper investigates the empirical labour supply behaviour of self employed solo practice physicians the specification of the empirical labour supply equation is based on a model of constrained utility maximizing behaviour that recognizes the physician makes work leisure choices based on an endogenous shadow wage and faces a nonlinear budget constraint the findings suggest that the typical self employed solo practice male physician operates on the upward sloping portion of the labour supply curve and is relatively unresponsive to changes in marginal hourly medical practice earnings and non practice income

physicians choices of specialty location and mode a reexamination within an interdependent decision framework in this paper physicians decisions regarding the specialty community size and mode of their first practices are analyzed in a simultaneous decision model using a nested logit specification physicians face a choice set consisting of eight specialties seven community sizes and three practice settings data come from the longitudinal survey of the class of 1960 income is found to be statistically significant and the average income elasticity is 1 05 which is considerably larger than previous estimates however the elasticity estimate is very sensitive to the assumed decision process a series of policy simulations are then performed to estimate the effect of specified income based policies on the predicted distribution of physicians across specialties community sizes and modes

a nested logit migration model with selectivity in this paper we specify a multiple choice migration model with selectivity we estimate this model using observations on individuals drawn from the 1971 census of venezuela there are two main innovations in this paper we apply a correction for the presence of selectivity in wage equations in the context of a multiple choice migration model and we apply a less restrictive technique for modelling multiple discrete choices than in previous studies we study the choices of individuals among 23 states of venezuela each individual is observed to have chosen one state so one wage is observable per person our hypothesis is that individuals choose where to locate on the basis of an evaluation of costs and benefits associated with choosing each state we measure the benefits associated with choosing a given state by means of the wage a person could earn in this state since we observe only one wage for each person we have to impute the unobserved wages for the states this person did not choose in order to study the role of wages in migration however it is possible that unobserved factors which affect both an individual s choice of location and his wages may result in sample selection bias if we try to estimate state specific wage equations by ols on the basis of the self selected samples we apply an estimator proposed by lee 1983 to estimate state specific wage equations free from sample selection bias the wage equations permit us to investigate whether individuals who choose particular states earn different wages from observationally identical individuals drawn from the population at random in the context of a developing country where internal migration flows are large evidence on the selectivity of migration will enhance our understanding of an important labor market adjustment mechanism evidence that people who choose particular locations earn more in those locations than would observationally identical individuals drawn at random from the population positive selection will suggest that migration decisions are made according to the principle of comparative advantage in modelling the choice of location we test whether subsets of states are more highly similar to each other than to other states unobserved similarities between states may arise because of similar amenities or economic conditions which are not otherwise explicitly controlled for in the model we implement the

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

merger policy in open economies abstract we extend farrell and shapiro s 1990 analysis of horizontal mergers to the case of an open economy we show how the rules for approving a merger ought to be adapted to account for the fact that the regulator is only concerned with domestic welfare that is ignores the effect of the merger on foreign firms and consumers we also explore the consequences of this externality in a model of a single market which includes consumers and producers of different countries in particular we provide conditions under which a decentralized process of evaluating merger proposals a la farrell shapiro can survive the externality mentioned above

are malpractice insurance premiums a tort signal that influence physician hours worked abstract this study reports some new evidence on the impact of malpractice insurance costs on physician labor supply behavior a strategy is proposed to test for the existence of malpractice premium tort signal effects on physician hours worked

workers compensation moral hazard and the composition of workplace injuries this paper provides evidence that workers compensation insurance wc affects not only the occurrence but also the composition of reported injuries in our theoretical approach wc is the source of two interrelated moral hazard problems underprovision of accident preventing efforts by the insured worker ex ante moral hazard and false reporting of injuries ex post moral hazard our model predicts that under certain assumptions the impact of wc benefits is stronger on the probability of reporting a difficult to diagnose injury than on the probability of reporting an injury that is easy to diagnose panel data on 9 800 workers in the quebec construction industry over each month of the period 1977 86 combining administrative data from the quebec construction board with data from the quebec workers compensation board are used for the estimates the parameters of the model are estimated using a threealternative logit kernel hybrid multinomial probit mnp framework with individual random effects our results confirm our theoretical pre

eliciting gps preferences for pecuniary and non pecuniary job characteristics abstract this study examines general practitioners preferences for pecuniary and non pecuniary job characteristics in the context of choosing a general practice in which to work a discrete choice experiment is used to test hypotheses about the nature of the utility function marginal rates of substitution between income and non pecuniary characteristics are calculated the results suggest that policies aimed at influencing general practitioners location choices should take account of both non pecuniary and pecuniary factors particularly out of hours work commitments

two remarks on cournot equilibria abstract we describe two simple results in the theory of cournot equilibria the first has to do with the effect of taxation in a cournot industry and the second describes under what conditions a cournot equilibrium will implicity maximize an objective function these results are probably known but are not well known and they seem useful enough to be worth spelling out

fee for service payment and consultation length in general practice a work leisure trade off model for french gps this article presents an adaptation of the labour supply model applied to the independent medical sector first we model simultaneous general practitioner gp decisions on both the leisure time and the consultation length for two payment schemes fixed fees and unregulated fees the objective of this econometric study is to validate the theoretical prediction that doctors under unregulated fees may make choices about the length of patient consultations independent of their personal leisure decision indeed according to our empirical results the bidirectional link between leisure choice and consultation length verified with fixed fees does not hold any longer under unregulated fees our findings can be seen as a necessary but not a sufficient condition to legitimize unregulated fees in general practice

multiple job holding the artist s labour supply approach this article analyses a labour supply model in which individuals maximize a utility function that depends on leisure time consumption and time devoted to an activity that is termed artistic this activity may generate income that depends nonlinearly on hours dedicated to it the individual can also work in the labour market an activity that does not increase utility by itself in exchange for an hourly wage and obtain income not related to hours conditions are obtained that sort individuals into two groups part time and full time artists deriving their labour supply functions in both activities the predictions of the model are tested empirically using a sample of musicians from a uruguayan performing rights society increases in outside wages drive part time artists out of the labour market but no significant increase in arts hours is detected higher nonlabour income also reduces nonarts work time of part time artists but does not have a significant impact in their arts hours conversely arts

the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic discrete choice models a survey our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the united states congress we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset given estimates of the structural model we

regulated competition in health care with or without a global budget abstract a major dilemma with respect to market oriented health care reforms is that politicians strongly focus on cost containment in the sense of stabilizing the fraction of gross national product to be spent on health care however we can not exclude the option that more competition will yield higher total health care costs this might induce politicians to put a global budget on health care expenditures in this paper we focus on the question whether regulated competition in health care should not be combined with a global budget

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

interregional migration and interindustry labour mobility in canada a simultaneous approach this paper argues that interindustry labour mobility and interregional migration are simultaneously determined processes it estimates a bivariate probit model of migration and mobility using data for canada and concludes that the interindustry mobility of labour is dominated by the availability of employment hours and that wage differentials are a statistically significant but small determinant of interregional migration since interindustry mobility is much larger in magnitude than interregional migration quantity constraints in labour markets are of central importance to the adaptive capacity of the economy summary in fre excerpt

the treadmill effect in a fixed budget system abstract we examine the interaction in the market for physician services when the total budget for reimbursement is fixed physicians obtain points for the services they render at the end of the period the budget is divided by the sum of all points submitted which determines the price per point we show that this retrospective payment system involves compared to a fee for service remuneration system a severe coordination problem which potentially leads to the treadmill effect we argue that when market entry is possible a budget can be efficiency enhancing if in addition a price floor is used

taxes fringe benefits and faculty the growth of employee benefits in academe has closely paralleled their economy wide growth this study estimates a complete system describing the demand for benefits and wages using panel data on 1477 institutions of higher learning the demand for benefits is very responsive to changes in real income and the tax price of benefits these conclusions are robust with respect to varying definitions of the tax price treating it as endogenous and accounting for unmeasured individual effects on demand simulations suggest that the tax reform act of 1986 sharply reduced the demand for benefits extrapolating the impact to the entire economy the annual flow of compensation shifted away from benefits by at least 15 billion copyright 1992 by mit press

physician response to fee changes with multiple payers this paper develops a general model of physician behavior with demand inducement encompassing the two benchmark cases of profit maximization and target income behavior it is shown that when income effects are absent physicians maximize profits and when income effects are very strong physicians seek a target income the model is used to derive own and cross price expressions for the response of physicians to fee changes in the realistic context of more than one payer under the alternative behavior assumptions of profit maximization and target income behavior the implications for public and private fee policy and empirical research on physician response to fees are discussed

measuring basic wants for state and local public goods a preference independence transformation approach a rotterdam demand framework is used to estimate the demand for five state and local government slg services a prefere nce independence transformation of these results identifies the under lying voter wants which these services satisfy the results reflect a shift from physical capital to human capital wants over the 1952 83 period a general slg want accounts for 75 to 95 percent of slg spend ing over this period a minimum service level want including mos t highway and infrastructure spending declines in importance over ti me while a human capital infrastructure contrast want composed of education and health spending increases in importance copyright 1987 by mit press

brain drain from turkey an investigation of students return intentions the emigration of skilled individuals from turkey attracted greater media attention and the interest of policymakers in turkey particularly after the experience of recurrent economic crises that have led to an increase in unemployment among the highly educated young this study estimates a model of return intentions using a data set compiled from an internet survey of turkish students residing abroad the findings of this study indicate that as expected higher salaries offered in the host country and lifestyle preferences including a more organized environment in the host country increase the probability of student nonreturn however the analysis also points to the importance of prior return intentions and the role of the family in the decision to return to turkey or stay overseas it is also found that the compulsory service requirement attached to government scholarships increases the probability of student return turkish student association membership also increases return intentions longer sta

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

on price caps under uncertainty this paper shows how standard arguments supporting the impo sition of price caps break down in the presence of demand uncertainty in particular though in the deterministic case the introduction or lowering of a price cap above marginal cost results in increased production increased total welfare decreased prices and increased consumer welfare we show that all of the above comparative statics predictions fail for generic uncertain demand functions for example for price caps su ciently close to marginal cost a decrease in the price cap always leads to a decrease in production and total welfare under certain mild conditions under stronger regularity assumptions all of the monotone comparative statics predictions from the deterministic case also do not hold for a generic uncertain demand if we restrict attention to price caps in an arbitrary flxed interval as long as the price caps are binding for some values in that interval

the design of payment systems for physicians under global budget an experimental study abstract this paper analyzes two alternative methods for controlling the cost of physician services under global budgeting the expenditure target involves quantity control while the expenditure cap is a retrospective price setting mechanism theoretical analysis shows that given the same spending a larger quantity of physician services will be provided under the symmetric nash equilibrium outcome of expenditure cap we conducted laboratory controlled experiment and found that the behavior of medical students was well approximated by the symmetric nash equilibrium therefore the experimental results support the theoretical analysis and confirm that expenditure cap is a better system