extreme return connectedness and its determinants between clean green and dirty energy investments abstract previous studies point to the time variation and asymmetry in the relationship between clean energy stocks and crude oil markets but there is a lack of evidence on the return spillovers between clean green assets and dirty energy assets crude oil and energy etf in lower and upper quantiles and their potential drivers to address these gaps we apply quantile based estimators to measure return connectedness at left and right tails of the conditional distribution of return shocks we find that the average level of return connectedness estimated at the mean median is 29 whereas it reaches 65 when estimated at the left and right tails thus return connectedness across clean energy stocks green bonds crude oil and energy etf is larger at both left and right tails implying that the unsuitability of applying mean based connectedness measures furthermore we show that return connectedness measures vary with time but they are less volatile in the tails notably return connectedness differs between periods of extreme negative returns and periods of extreme negative returns suggesting an asymmetric behaviour an analysis of the drivers of the return connectedness shows the importance of macroeconomic conditions especially at middle and lower quantiles us dollar has a positive impact in all cases whereas the crude oil market uncertainty intensifies the return spillovers at the lower quantile

quality competition with motivated providers and sluggish demand we study incentives for quality provision in markets where providers are motivated semi altruistic prices are regulated and firms are funded by a combination of block grants and unit prices competition is based on quality and demand adjusts sluggishly health or education are sectors in which the mentioned features are the rule we show that the presence of motivated providers makes dynamic competition tougher resulting in higher steady state levels of quality in the closed loop solution than in the benchmark open loop solution if the price is sufficiently high however this result is reversed if the price is sufficiently low and below unit costs sufficiently low prices also imply that a reduction in demand sluggishness will lead to lower steady state quality prices below unit costs will nevertheless be welfare optimal if the providers are sufficiently motivated

reputational concerns with altruistic providers we study a model of reputational concerns when doctors differ in their degree of altruism and they can signal their altruism by their observable quality when reputational concerns are high following the introduction or enhancement of public reporting the less altruistic bad doctor mimics the more altruistic good doctor otherwise either a separating or a semi separating equilibrium arises the bad doctor mimics the good doctor with probability less than one pay for performance incentive schemes are unlikely to induce crowding out unless some dimensions of quality are unobservable under the pooling equilibrium a purchaser can implement the first best quality by appropriately choosing a simple payment scheme with a fixed price per unit of quality provided this is not the case under the separating equilibrium therefore policies that enhance public reporting complement pay for performance schemes

oil prices and the stock prices of alternative energy companies energy security issues coupled with increased concern over the natural environment are driving factors behind oil price movements while it is widely accepted that rising oil prices are good for the financial performance of alternative energy companies there has been relatively little statistical work done to measure just how sensitive the financial performance of alternative energy companies are to changes in oil prices in this paper a four variable vector autoregression model is developed and estimated in order to investigate the empirical relationship between alternative energy stock prices technology stock prices oil prices and interest rates our results show technology stock prices and oil prices each individually granger cause the stock prices of alternative energy companies simulation results show that a shock to technology stock prices has a larger impact on alternative energy stock prices than does a shock to oil prices these results should be of use to investors managers and policy makers

hospital competition with soft budgets we study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost reducing effort when their budgets are soft i e the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses the basic set up is a hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty where the hospitals run deficits surpluses in the high low demand state softer budgets reduce cost efficiency while the effect on quality is ambiguous for given cost efficiency softer budgets increase quality since parts of the expenditures may be covered by the payer however softer budgets reduce cost reducing effort and the profit margin which in turn weakens quality incentives we also find that profit confiscation reduces quality and cost reducing effort first best is achieved by a strict no bailout and no profit confiscation policy when the regulated price is optimally set however for suboptimal prices a more lenient bailout policy can be welfare improving

selfish bakers caring nurses a model of work motivation abstract work contributes to people s self image in important ways we propose a model in which effort is unobservable and where individuals have a preference for being important to others this gives the following predictions 1 if a worker s effort is paid by his marginal productivity bakers effort is just like in the standard model 2 if a worker s wage is unaffected by his effort nurses more effort is provided than in the standard model 3 to prevent that shirkers become nurses nurses wages must be kept strictly lower than bakers income at this wage level there will be too few nurses 4 overinvestment in nursing equipment can be justified as a means to attract motivated nurses 5 even with full income compensation both nurses and bakers may experience a net utility loss when losing their job 6 similarly both nurses and bakers may prefer work to welfare even with full income compensation

competition and screening with motivated health professionals two hospitals compete for the exclusive services of health professionals who are privately informed about their ability and motivation hospitals differ in their ownership structure and in the mission they pursue the non profit hospital sacrifices some profits to follow its mission but becomes attractive for motivated workers in equilibrium when both hospitals are active the sorting of workers to hospitals is efficient and ability neutral allocative distortions are decreasing in the degree of competition and disappear when hospitals are similar the non profit hospital tends to provide a higher amount of care and offer lower salaries than the for profit one

quality competition with profit constraints abstract firms in markets such as health care and education are often profit constrained due to regulation or their non profit status and they are often viewed as being altruistic towards consumers we use a spatial competition framework to study incentives for cost containment and quality provision by altruistic firms facing profit constraints if prices are regulated profit constraints lead to lower cost containment efforts but higher quality if and only if firms are sufficiently altruistic under price competition profit constraints reduce quality and cost containment efforts but lead to lower prices if and only if firms are sufficiently altruistic profit constrained firms cost containment efforts are below the first best while their quality might be too high or too low if prices are regulated profit constraints can improve welfare and be a complement or substitute to a higher regulated price depending on the degree of altruism

incentives for motivated agents under an administrative constraint consider an agent who has an expertise in producing a non marketable good this good is valued by a single principal and there is a verifiable measure of the agent s performance crucially the agent is intrinsically motivated due to warm glow altruism in addition the agent s budget which is controlled by the principal must not be less than the monetary performance cost faced by the agent this gives rise to a limited liability constraint it also restricts the agent s ability to under report costs in such environment we determine the link between the agent s budget and performance our results come in contrast to the received solution of the principal agent problem and to most in the literature on mission motivated organisations and public services provision

connectedness network and dependence structure mechanism in green investments abstract we present an empirical study of renewable energy stock returns and their relation to four major investment asset classes stocks currency us treasury bonds and oil and several sources of uncertainty applying nonlinear causality and connectedness network analysis on data covering the period 2004 2016 we investigate the directionality and connectedness among different asset classes as well as between uncertainties first from the results of the estimation of directionality and network spillovers it can be concluded that the european stock market has a strong market dependence on renewable energy stock prices second uncertainties have an economically significant impact on both return and volatility spillover in energy investments third most of the uncertainties are net transmitters of volatility connectedness during the global financial crisis gfc and european sovereign debt crisis esdc

purchasing health care services from providers with unknown altruism cost sharing rules for paying physicians have been advanced as a way of generating incentives for the provision of quality care while recognizing their potential negative effects on production efficiency however the optimal sharing rate typically depends on the degree to which the physician acts in the interest of the patient what we identify as the physician s altruism since the degree of altruism is likely to vary across physicians and to be private information the standard rules for setting the cost sharing rate are unlikely to be optimal this paper derives conditions for the optimal non linear cost sharing mechanism in the presence of asymmetric information about altruism and shows how it can sometimes be implemented through a menu of linear cost sharing schemes the model can be used to rationalize the design of the fund holder system for general practictioners that operated in the 1990s in the united kingdom

the durability of human capital some new evidence this paper analyzes the effect of chronological aging experience job search change of job and or employer and formal training on the wage growth of a sample of young men following the human capital literature wage growth directly corresponds to human capital and the analysis allows for the assessment of the durability or rate of depreciation of human capital if further investments are not made the findings suggest that human capital is not very durable contrary to some previous estimates given in the literature

the nonprofit sector and industry performance abstract despite the importance of nonprofit industries in the economy little analysis has been conducted as to whether the behavior of such industries differs from that of for profit industries extending previous firm level analyses we propose a neoclassical theory with an endogenous nonprofit sector our analysis implies that nonprofit firms have a competitive advantage over for profit firms so that marginal changes in the industry operate through the for profit sector as such marginal industry behavior is identical to that of a for profit industry and nonprofit regulations may have a limited impact or even no impact on overall industry performance our theory has the methodological advantage that standard for profit analysis applies directly to nonprofit firms because they can be analyzed as for profit firms with lower costs we discuss aspects of the empirical literature that test this theory of nonprofit activity

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

evolutionary competition in a mixed market with socially concerned firms abstract in this paper we study an oligopoly market where profit maximizing firms and socially concerned firms compete in quantities confronting remarks by milton friedman and gary becker we are using an evolutionary setting to investigate the endogenous choice of the proper objective of business firms and the influence of product differentiation on the long run survival of firms which pursue non profit motives we find that firms which consider a combination of profit and consumer welfare can indeed have larger market shares and profits than their profit maximizing rivals one insight is that it might pay off for shareholders to consider stakeholder welfare but that the level of social concern should not be too high based on a strategy s profitability we consider asynchronous evolutionary updating with firms selecting nash quantities or choosing best replies to the expected market quantity here we observe that the consumers willingness to pay a price premium for products is crucial for the long run survival of socially concerned firms depending on the degrees of product differentiation and social concern long run outcomes consist either of both types of firms or only one type of firm if the firms propensity to switch between a social or a profit maximizing strategy is sufficiently large steady states are unstable and even complicated dynamics can occur

not for profit entrepreneurs abstract entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not for profit status as a means of committing to soft incentives such incentives protect donors volunteers consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entrepreneur we derive conditions under which completely self interested entrepreneurs opt for not for profit status despite the fact that this status limits their ability to enjoy the profits of their enterprises we also show that even in the absence of tax advantages unrestricted donations would flow to non profits rather than for profit firms because donations have more significant influence on the decisions of the non profits

contracting for health services when patient demand does not reflect quality this paper analyses contracts to keep down costs while maintaining quality of health services when patient demand does not reflect quality there is then a natural role for forms of contract that have emerged during the reforms of the nhs in britain that differ from pure fixed price or cost reimbursement contracts the optimal form depends on whether the provider is entirely self interested or benevolent in having genuine concern for patient welfare with fully benevolent providers there are roles for block and cost and volume contracts with partially benevolent providers some degree of cost sharing is typically optimal

the economics of vocation or why is a badly paid nurse a good nurse abstract given the longstanding shortage of nurses in many jurisdictions why could not nursing wages be raised to attract more people into the profession we tell a story in which the status of nursing as a vocation implies that increasing wages reduces the average quality of applicants attracted the underlying mechanism accords with the notion that increasing wages might attract the wrong sort of people into the profession and highlights an in efficiency wage mechanism particular to vocations which makes wages sticky up wards the analysis has implications for job design in vocation based sectors such as nursing and teaching

oil shocks and their impact on energy related stocks in china abstract this paper contributes to the current literature by adopting time varying conditional correlation and asset pricing models to discover how the dynamics of international oil prices affect energy related stock returns in china after conditioning for structural instability the results show a much stronger relation following the 2008 financial crisis we argue that this reflects the fact that investors in the chinese stock market especially for energy related stocks are more sensitive to the shocks in international crude oil market

information linkage dynamic spillovers in prices and volatility between the carbon and energy markets abstract the european union emissions trading system eu ets has strengthened the information flow and connection between carbon market and energy markets which makes the carbon energy system more complicated this paper investigates information linkages and dynamic spillover effects between the carbon and energy markets we adopt a systemic time series approach to study connectedness in both returns and volatility in the carbon energy system moreover a rolling windows method is used to show the dynamic features empirical results show that brent oil prices play an important role in affecting carbon price changes and risks feedback exists from the carbon market to other energy markets and electricity prices are shown to be the biggest information receiver in the system it is also shown that the level of connectedness in the volatility system is substantially higher than that in the returns system our results can provide useful implications for policymakers to design market mechanisms and market investors to manage their portfolios

hospital competition and quality with regulated prices we analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices considering the effect of both introducing competition monopoly versus competition and increasing competition through either lower transportation costs increased substitutability or a higher number of hospitals with semi altruistic providers and a fairly general cost structure we show that the relationship between competition and quality is generally ambiguous in contrast to the received body of theoretical literature this is consistent with and potentially explains the mixed empirical evidence

shifts in volatility driven by large stock market shocks abstract this paper presents an extension of the stochastic volatility model which allows for level shifts in volatility of stock market returns known as structural breaks these shifts are endogenously driven by large return shocks innovations reflecting large pieces of market news these shocks are identified from the data as being bigger in absolute terms than the values of two threshold parameters of the model one for the negative shocks and one for the positive shocks the model can be employed to investigate different sources of stock market volatility shifts driven by market news without relying on exogenous information in addition to this it has a number of interesting features which enable us to study the effects of large return shocks on future levels of market volatility the above properties of the model are shown based on a study for the us stock market volatility

profit or patients health benefit exploring the heterogeneity in physician altruism abstract this paper investigates physician altruism toward patients health benefit using behavioral data from hennig schmidt et al s 2011 laboratory experiment in the experiment medical students in the role of physicians decide on the provision of medical services the experimental setup allows us to identify the influence of profits and patients health benefit on the choice of medical treatment we estimate physician altruism the weight individuals attach to patients health benefit by fitting mixed logit and multinomial logit regression models to the experimental data estimation results provide evidence for physician altruism we find however substantial variation in the degree of physician altruism we also discuss some implications of our results for the design of physician payment schemes in the light of the theoretical literature

assessing competition in hospital care markets the importance of accounting for quality differentiation quality differentiation is especially important in the hospital industry where the choices of medicare patients are unaffected by prices unlike previous studies that use geographic market concentration to estimate hospital competitiveness this article emphasizes the importance of quality differentiation in this spatially differentiated market i estimate a random coefficients discrete choice model that predicts patient flow to different hospitals and find that demand responses to both distance and quality are substantial the estimates suggest that patients do not substitute toward alternative hospitals in proportion to current market shares implying that geographic market concentration is an inappropriate measure of hospital competitiveness

asymmetric information ownership and quality of care an empirical analysis of nursing homes theoretically when asymmetric information exists nonprofit organizations due to the attenuation of the property right provide better quality of service than do the for profits despite extensive theoretical examination of the behavior of nonprofits there has been very little empirical testing of the plausibility of these theories this article addresses the effect of ownership type on the quality of service in the nursing home industry an environment particularly conducive to identifying the existence of asymmetric information the study shows that the differences between for profit and nonprofit homes do become manifest when asymmetric information is present

competition in public service provision the role of not for profit providers abstract with public services such as health and education it is not straightforward for consumers to assess the quality of provision many such services are provided by monopoly not for profit providers and there is concern that for profit providers may increase profit at the expense of quality this paper explores the implications of entry by for profit providers when there is unobserved quality the model generates three key policy relevant insights first by developing a novel approach to competition between different organizational forms it frames the relevant trade offs precisely second it shows the value of keeping an incumbent not for profit as an active provider third it characterizes the optimal payment or voucher value to an entrant for each consumer who switches in a way that can be applied empirically

optimal price setting in pay for performance schemes in health care abstract the increased availability of process measures implies that the quality of health care is in some areas de facto verifiable optimal price setting for verifiable dimensions of quality is well described in the theoretical literature on incentive design we seek to narrow the large gap that remains between actual price setting behaviour in pay for performance schemes and the incentive design literature we present a stylised model for hospital price setting for process measures of quality and show that optimal hospital prices should reflect the marginal benefit of the expected health gains the weight given to patients benefit relative to profits and the opportunity cost of public funds based on published estimates we derive the optimal prices for three measures of quality that have been incentivised in the english national health service since april 2010 treatment in an acute stroke unit rapid brain imaging and thrombolysis with alteplase we then compare the optimal prices with the actual prices offered to hospitals in england under the best practice tariffs scheme for emergency stroke care

hospital quality choice and market structure in a regulated duopoly this paper analyzes the optimal structure of a regulated health care industry in a model in which the regulator cannot enforce what hospitals do unverifiable quality of health or does not know what hospitals know incomplete information about production costs or both we show that if quality is unverifiable the choice between monopoly and duopoly does not change with respect to the verifiable case but if there are fixed costs assumed to be quality dependent and the monopoly is the optimal market structure the quality level of the operative hospital decreases asymmetry of information introduces informational rents that can be reduced by increasing the most efficient hospital s market share a monopoly is chosen more often

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

time and frequency dynamics of connectedness between renewable energy stocks and crude oil prices abstract this paper examines the time and frequency dynamics of connectedness among stock prices of u s clean energy companies crude oil prices and a number of key financial variables using the methodology developed by barunik and krehlik 2018 this approach allows measuring the dynamics of return and volatility connectedness over time and across frequencies simultaneously the empirical results show that most of return and volatility connectedness is generated in the very short term i e movements up to five days while the long term plays a minor role our analysis further reveals a greater degree of interconnectedness across crude oil and financial markets since the onset of the u s subprime mortgage crisis in summer of 2007 consistent with the view of a global re pricing of risk triggered by the recent worldwide financial crisis crude oil prices do not appear as a key driver of the stock market performance of renewable energy companies in the short term or the long term which suggests a decoupling of the alternative energy industry from the traditional energy market moreover crude oil prices are a net receiver of financial shocks supporting the financialization of the commodity markets since the early 2000s in addition a significant pairwise connectedness is found mainly in the short term between clean energy and technology stock prices indicating that these two types of stocks are perceived by investors as similar assets these results can have important practical implications for investors and policy makers with different time horizons

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

thanks for nothing not for profits and motivated agents we re examine the labor donation theory of not for profits and show that these organizations may exist not necessarily because motivated workers prefer to work in them or that they dominate for profits in terms of welfare but because the excess supply of motivated workers makes the non profit form more attractive to managers we show that if firms had to compete for motivated workers then not for profit firms would be competed out by for profit firms therefore in the choice between not for profit and for profit provision other than incentive problems the distribution of rents between management and workers and consequently the relative scarcity of motivated workers may play an important role

correlations and volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy and technology companies abstract in this paper multivariate garch models are used to model conditional correlations and to analyze the volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy companies and technology companies four different multivariate garch models bekk diagonal constant conditional correlation and dynamic conditional correlation are compared and contrasted the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and generates results showing that the stock prices of clean energy companies correlate more highly with technology stock prices than with oil prices on average a 1 long position in clean energy companies can be hedged for 20 cents with a short position in the crude oil futures market

uncertainty and crude oil returns we use a copula approach to investigate the effect of uncertainty on crude oil returns using copulas to construct multivariate distributions of time series data permit the calculation of the dependence structure between the series independently of the marginal distributions further we implement the copula estimation using a rolling window method to allow for a time varying effect of equity and economic policy uncertainty on oil returns the results show that higher uncertainty as measured by equity and economic policy uncertainty indices significantly increase crude oil returns only during certain periods of time that is we find a positive dependence prior to the financial crisis and great recession interestingly estimation of the copula over the entire sample period leads to a negative dependence between the equity and economic policy indices and the crude oil return

commodity prices interest rates and the dollar this paper sheds light on recent fluctuations in commodity prices we investigate whether a decline in real interest rates and the us dollar contributes to higher commodity prices and whether commodity prices display overshooting behavior in response to changes in real interest rates we analyze the behavior of real prices of crude oil food metals and industrial raw materials the analysis is based on structural var models estimated on quarterly data over the period 1990q1 2007q4 our results suggest that commodity prices increase significantly in response to reductions in real interest rates moreover oil prices and prices of industrial raw materials tend to display overshooting behavior in response to such interest rate changes the evidence also suggests that a weaker dollar leads to higher commodity prices shocks to interest rates and the dollar are found to account for substantial shares of fluctuations in commodity prices

the dynamic connectedness of uk regional property returns in this study we examine the network topology of uk regional property returns over the period 1973q4 2014q4 using a dynamic measure of connectedness developed by diebold and yilmaz 2014 overall

stock prices of clean energy firms oil and carbon markets a vector autoregressive analysis recent discussions of energy security and climate change have attracted significant attention to clean energy we hypothesize that rising prices of conventional energy and or placement of a price on carbon emissions would encourage investments in clean energy firms the data from three clean energy indices show that oil prices and technology stock prices separately affect the stock prices of clean energy firms however the data fail to demonstrate a significant relationship between carbon prices and the stock prices of the firms

sorting with motivated agents implications for school competition and teacher incentives this paper proposes a simple framework to study incentives and matching in the market for teachers the framework is used to investigate the consequences of introducing incentive pay for teachers when contracts have both a matching and an incentive effect our analysis suggests that school competition and teacher incentives cannot be studied in isolation from one another jel d73 i20 j45 l31

competition and decentralisation in government bureaucracies abstract recent reforms to the provision of welfare services by the public sector have transferred control rights in production from politicians to managers and simultaneously introduced competition between public sector suppliers we derive conditions under which a self interested politician will introduce either competition and or managerial control for services where quality matters we show that both competition and managerial control give incentives for greater managerial effort however the cost of competition is higher taxes and the cost of decentralisation is a loss of political benefits the politician will introduce these reforms if the political benefits from higher value service outweigh these costs

competition and equity in health care markets we provide a model where hospitals compete on quality under fixed prices to investigate how hospital competition affects i quality differences between hospitals and as a result ii health inequalities across hospitals and patient severities the answer to the first question is ambiguous and depends on factors related to both demand and supply of health care whether competition increases or reduces health inequalities depends on the type and measure of inequality health inequalities due to the postcode lottery are more likely to decrease if the marginal health gains from quality decrease at a higher rate whereas health inequalities between high and low severity patients decrease if patient composition effects are sufficiently small we also investigate the effect of competition on health inequalities as measured by the gini and the generalised gini coefficients and highlight differences compared to the simpler dispersion measures

is there dependence and systemic risk between oil and renewable energy stock prices abstract we study systemic risk and dependence between oil and renewable energy markets using copulas to characterize the dependence structure and to compute the conditional value at risk as a measure of systemic risk we found significant time varying average and symmetric tail dependence between oil returns and several global and sectoral renewable energy indices our evidence on systemic risk indicates that oil price dynamics significantly contributes around 30 to downside and upside risk of renewable energy companies these results have important implications for risk management and renewable energy policies

quality incentives for gps in a regulated market abstract this paper analyses whether gps in a capitation system have incentives to provide quality even though health is a credence good a model is developed where the quality of the service varies due to inherent differences between the gps and rational patients make choices based on the outcome of treamtent we find that it is difficult to provide appropriate incentives since the search activity of patients offsets direct effects of a change in reimbursement variation in the inherent ability of the gps is good since it increases the search activity of the patients and the optimal reimbursement scheme is inversely proportional to the dispersion in types finally we find that offering a menu of contracts can potentially increase social welfare above the level of a simple capitation regime but it tends to lead to a higher variation in quality levels