political cycles and economic performance in oecd countries empirical evidence from 1951 2006 this paper examines whether electoral motives and government ideology influence short term economic performance i employ data on annual gdp growth in 21 oecd countries over the 1951 2006 period and provide a battery of empirical tests in countries with two party systems gdp growth is boosted before elections and under leftwing governments in the first two years of a legislative period these findings indicate that political cycles are more prevalent in two party systems because voters can clearly punish or reward political parties for governmental performance my findings imply that we need more elaborate theories of how government ideology and electoral motives influence short term economic performance

disaggregating china s local political budget cycles righting the u abstract what impact does spending time horizon have on political budget cycles while traditional political budget cycles increase visible spending with immediate gains before political turnover i hypothesize that spending in categories with less immediate gains categories increases when opportunity costs are lower in this article i build on existing literature on budget cycles in both democracies and non democracies to disaggregate types of budget cycles those with long run versus short run benefits in china after central level reforms welfare targets with long run gains became visible to local leaders constituents the central leaders above them local leaders then had an incentive to provide welfare but only when it was the least costly in terms of opportunity costs using fixed effects models panel data from china s 333 municipalities for 1994 2012 i find welfare spending minimizes both relatively and absolutely around year three and maximizes at the beginning and end of a politician s tenure when opportunity costs and probability of political advancement are lowest these cycles are the most dramatic in western provinces where education is a particularly important tool for ideological spread health and social security spending also see expansion at the end of mayor s tenures although the cycles are less pronounced than in education spending this study expands the literature on political budget cycles by disaggregating government spending and considering the impact of timeliness on cycles

what drives health care expenditure baumol s model of unbalanced growth revisited the share of health care expenditure in gdp rises rapidly in virtually all oecd countries causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public yet economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are this paper revisits baumol s baumol w j 1967 macroeconomics of unbalanced growth the anatomy of urban crisis american economic review 57 3 415 426 model of unbalanced growth showing that the latter offers a ready explanation for the observed inexorable rise in health care expenditure the main implication of baumol s model in this context is that health care expenditure is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth this hypothesis is tested empirically using data from a panel of 19 oecd countries our tests yield robust evidence in favor of baumol s theory

examining structural breaks and growth rates in international health expenditures over the last decade there has been a growing interest in examining health expenditures in this paper we study the behaviour of health expenditures in the g3 countries usa the uk and japan and three european countries the uk switzerland and spain over the period 1960 2000 from a different perspective in that we examine 1 whether there is a common structural break in health expenditures across the g3 and european countries 2 whether structural breaks have slowed down health expenditure growth rates in these countries or vice versa our main findings are that 1 health expenditures share a common break in both bivariate and trivariate cases and structural breaks and break intervals suggest that either one or a combination of events second oil price shock the 1987 stock market crash and or recessions have contributed to the commonality of break in health expenditures in the g3 while the oil price shocks have been instrumental in the commonality of breaks for the european countries 2 except for the uk structural breaks have slowed down growth rates in health expenditures for the usa japan switzerland and spain

limits of exact equilibria for capacity constrained sellers with costly search abstract this paper studies finite versions of competitive matching models in which sellers announce prices and buyers understand the relationship between price and probability of trade two equilibrium concepts are studied for finite games subgame perfect equilibrium and rational expectations equilibrium it is shown that the distribution of prices offered by sellers under both equilibrium concepts converges weakly to the same competitive equilibrium distribution of prices furthermore the payoffs that sellers face in both kinds of equilibrium have the market utility property in the limit journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d41 d45

globesity the effects of globalization on obesity and caloric intake abstract we examine the effect of globalization in its economic and social dimensions on obesity and caloric intake namely the so called globesity hypothesis our results suggest a robust association between globalization and both obesity and caloric intake a one standard deviation increase in globalization is associated with a 23 8 percent increase in obese population and a 4 3 percent rise in calorie intake the effect remains statistically significant even after using an instrumental variable strategy to correct for some possible reverse causality and ommited variable bias a lagged structure and corrections for panel standard errors however we find that the primary driver of the globesity phenomenon is the social rather than the economic dimension of globalization and specifically the effect of changes in information flows and social proximity on obesity a one standard deviation increase in social globalization increased the percentage of obese population by 13 7 percent

do per capita health care expenditures converge among oecd countries evidence from unit root tests with level and trend shifts this study examines the stochastic conditional convergence of per capita health care expenditures pchce among 19 oecd countries over the period 1972 2008 specifically newly developed lm and rals lm unit root tests with allowance for two endogenously determined structural breaks are employed the results indicate support for pchce convergence among most oecd countries the results are stronger in more general tests that control for two breaks and nonnormal errors panel unit root tests provide additional support for the stochastic convergence of pchce

macroeconomic policy in a two party system as a repeated game this paper considers the interaction of two parties with different objectives concerning inflation and unemployment and rational and forward looking wage setters if discretionary policies are followed an economic cycle related to the political cycle results in equilibrium this cycle is significantly different from the traditional political business cycle reputational mechanisms due to the repeated interaction of the two parties and the public or commitments to a common policy rule can improve upon the discretionary outcome by reducing or eliminating the magnitude of the economic fluctuations

political and institutional determinants of fiscal policy in the european community in recent theoretical and empirical research the variation in political and institutional arrangements which may affect the process of national policy formation is examined in order to explain cross country differences with respect to fiscal policies pursued in this paper we build upon this literature and examine whether and how cross country differences in debt accumulation and public sector size of member countries of the european community during the 1980s can be explained we conclude that the growth of government debt is positively related to the frequency of government changes and negatively to sound budgetary procedures in countries with left wing governments the growth of the share of government spending in total output generally tends to be higher

top income shares in oecd countries the role of government ideology and globalisation this paper investigates how government ideology and globalisation are associated with top income shares in 17 oecd countries over the period 1970 to 2014 we use top income shares of the world wealth and income database wid globalisation is measured by the kof index of globalisation static and dynamic panel model results show that the top income shares increased more under right wing governments than under left wing governments the ideology induced effect was stronger when globalisation proceeded more rapidly globalisation was positively correlated with income shares of the upper middle class p99 p90 but negatively with income shares of the rich top 1 in the overall sample we show that the relationship differs between anglo saxon countries and other oecd countries globalisation was more pro rich in anglo saxon countries than in other oecd countries government ideology does not turn out to have a statistically significant effect on top income shares in anglo saxon countries after the 1980s whereas ideology induced differences in the distributional outcomes continued in other oecd countries

competitive search equilibrium in this paper i construct an equilibrium for markets with frictions which is competitive in the sense that all agents are price takers and maximize utility subject to a set of market parameters i show that the equilibrium allocation is socially optimal i also show how the competitive search equilibrium can be achieved if employers with vacancies can advertise publicly the wages they pay

on stationarity and cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this paper examines stationarity and cointegration of health expenditure and gdp for a sample of 21 oecd countries using data for the period 1960 1997 by applying a test battery that allows robust inference to be made on the stationarity and cointegration issue trend stationarity and no cointegration are tested using new country by country and panel tests not previously applied in this setting new results for country by country and panel tests of non stationarity and cointegration are presented our unit root and trend stationarity results indicate that both health expenditure and gdp are non stationary the no cointegration and cointegration results indicate that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated

electoral cycles in government employment evidence from us gubernatorial elections abstract incumbents may opportunistically design policies increasing employment before elections or postpone cuts until afterwards i investigate electoral cycles in public sector employment around us gubernatorial elections exploiting staggered gubernatorial election cycles across states i use both county fixed effects models and a geographic discontinuity design that compares neighboring counties at state borders with a difference in gubernatorial election cycles consistent with manipulation state and local government employment per capita are higher leading up to elections afterwards employment abruptly returns to normal political and spatial heterogeneities are investigated including by election competitiveness term limits incumbent party affiliation and ideological alignment between the incumbent and the state legislature or local citizens differences across types of government employment and private sector employment are also explored

search intensity job advertising and efficiency this paper demonstrates that if both firms and workers search the other side of the market for job matches the equilibrium rate of unemployment is likely to be too high both sides ignore a positive externality of their search when they establish a job match they remove from the market a job searcher so they save society his search costs i show that there is no feasible wage rate that can internalize this externality under fairly weak restrictions on the technology of search

can baumol s model of unbalanced growth contribute to explaining the secular rise in health care expenditure an alternative test in a recent paper i argued that baumol s model of unbalanced growth offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure hce in rich countries baumol s model implies that hce is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth i tested this hypothesis empirically using data from a panel of 19 organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries and found robust evidence in favour of baumol s theory an alternative way to test baumol s theory is to check whether its implication that variations in the relative price of medical care contribute significantly to explaining variations in health expenditure in the same direction has an empirical grounding earlier studies although mostly not in an explicit attempt to test baumol s theory have occasionally rejected this hypothesis despite poor data quality of the available medical price indices i perform the alternative test using data for nine oecd countries my findings suggest that the relat

does globalization affect growth evidence from a new index of globalization the study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions economic integration social integration and political integration using panel data for 123 countries in 1970 2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth as the results show globalization indeed promotes growth the dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries although less robustly information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect

the growth of public health expenditures in oecd countries do government ideology and electoral motives matter this paper empirically evaluates whether government ideology and electoral motives influenced the growth of public health expenditures in 18 oecd countries over the 1971 2004 period the results suggest that incumbents behaved opportunistically and increased the growth of public health expenditures in election years government ideology did not have an influence these findings indicate 1 the importance of public health in policy debates before elections and 2 the political pressure towards re organizing public health policy platforms especially in times of demographic change

health care expenditures and gdp panel data unit root test results abstract this short paper presents unit root test results for time series on per capita national health care expenditures and gross domestic product in the oecd unlike the country by country test used by hansen p king a 1996 the determinants of health care expenditure a cointegration approach j health econ 15 127 137 the test we employ exploits the panel nature of the oecd data using this approach we are able to reject the null hypothesis that these series contain unit roots no single test is likely to be definitive in this rapidly evolving area of econometric research however our results help to mitigate concern that panel data analyses of national health care expenditures are misspecified

health care expenditure and gdp are they broken stationary in this paper we analyse the stationarity of the real per capita health care expenditure hce and real per capita gdp for a sample of oecd countries allowing for the presence of multiple structural breaks one novelty of the paper is that it permits the presence of structural breaks that affect both the level and the slope of the time series after the cross section dependence is accounted for we have found that these variables can be characterised as stationary processes evolving around a broken trend

fiscal transparency political parties and debt in oecd countries abstract many believe and argue that fiscal or budgetary transparency has large positive effects on fiscal performance however the evidence linking transparency and fiscal policy outcomes is less compelling to analyze the effects of fiscal transparency on public debt accumulation we present a career concerns model with political parties this allows us to integrate as implications of a single model three hitherto separate results in the literature on deficit and debt accumulation that transparency decreases debt accumulation at least by reducing an electoral cycle in deficits that right wing governments at least for strategic reasons tend to have higher deficits than left wing governments and that increasing political polarization increases debt accumulation to test the predictions of the model we construct a replicable index of fiscal transparency on 19 country oecd data simultaneous estimates of debt and transparency strongly confirm that a higher degree of fiscal transparency is associated with lower public debt and deficits independent of controls for explanatory variables from other approaches

stationarity of health expenditures and gdp evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks this paper re examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and gdp in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 oecd countries over the period from 1960 to 1997 previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust we advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel lm unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts in contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

aggregate health care expenditures and national income is health care a luxury good it is well known that a strong relationship exists between national expenditures on health care and national income this has been used to suggest that health care is a luxury good and that factors such as the type of health care delivery system in a country are of little importance in determining expenditure levels this paper argues that these implications rely upon the application of microeconomic analysis to macroeconomic data and that this is not appropriate as well as raising questions about the inferences drawn from previous studies new empirical evidence is presented which casts some doubts on previous findings international comparisons are based on purchasing power parity rather than exchange rate conversions underlining the importance of prices as well as quantities in the relationship and leading to the conclusion that the aggregate data show health care to be if anything a necessity rather than a luxury good

does government ideology influence deregulation of product markets empirical evidence from oecd countries this paper examines how government ideology has influenced deregulation of product markets in oecd countries i analyze a dataset of non manufacturing regulation indicators covering energy transport and communication industries in 21 oecd countries over the 1980 2003 period and employ two different indices of government ideology the results suggest that government ideology has had a strong influence on the deregulation process market oriented governments promoted the deregulation of the energy transport and communication industries this finding identifies remarkable differences between leftist and rightwing governments concerning the role of government in the economy and basic elements of political order

the electoral dynamics of human development this paper analyses the impact of elections on the dynamics of human development in a panel of 82 countries over the period 1980 2013 the incidence of partisan and political support effects is also taken into account a gmm estimator is employed in the empirical analysis and the results point out to the presence of an electoral cycle in the growth rate of human development majority governments also influence it but no clear evidence is found regarding partisan effects the electoral cycles have proved to be stronger in non oecd countries in countries with less frequent elections with lower levels of income and human development in presidential and non plurality systems and in proportional representation regimes they have also become more intense in this millennium

political determinants of budget deficits coalition effects versus minority effects this paper reexamines some recent empirical evidence on the hypothesis that institutional arrangements in the political process affect budget deficits the results of roubini and sachs 1989b are replicated and sensitivity analysis indicate that their results are robust however the main conclusion of roubini and sachs that coalition governments are less capable of budgetary discipline needs to be modified a reformulation of their variable representing political cohesion reveals that it captures the effects of minority governments rather than majority coalition governments the data support the hypothesis that it is harder to negotiate in parliament than within a government

better outcomes at lower costs the effect of public health expenditures on hospital efficiency abstractlocal health departments play a critical role in the community they serve as they are the foundation of the u s public health system providing services such as immunizations to the less af

perfect competition in the continuous assignment model abstract this paper provides a rigorous formalization in the context of the transferable utility assignment model of perfect competition as the inability of individuals to favorably influence prices the central tool for the analysis is the social gains function the central issue is differentiability of the gains function with respect to the population seven conditions are shown to be equivalent to perfect competition perfect competition and imperfect competition are possible for both finite and continuum assignment economies but most finite economies are imperfectly competitive while most continuum economies are perfectly competitive however most large finite assignment economies are approximately perfectly competitive journal of economic literature classification numbers c61 c62 c78

frictional assignment i efficiency abstract this paper examines the two sided matching problem where the agents on each side of the market are heterogeneous and the matching process is time consuming this is cast in a labor market setting where workers of different skills match with different machine qualities i characterize the efficient allocation and then show that it can be decentralized by a market mechanism the efficient assignment is not always positively assortative despite the fact that machine qualities and skills are complementary in production to decentralize the efficient allocation the market mechanism requires the firms to post wages and commit each machine quality to a particular skill implications on wage inequality are briefly examined journal of economic literature classification numbers j31 e24 j64

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

the evidence on globalisation globalisation is blamed for many socioeconomic shortcomings i discuss the consequences of globalisation by surveying the empirical globalisation literature my focus is on the kof indices of globalisation that have been used in more than 100 studies early studies using the kof index reported correlations between globalisation and several outcome variables studies published more recently identify causal effects the evidence shows that globalisation has spurred economic growth promoted gender equality and improved human rights moreover globalisation did not erode welfare state activities did not have any significant effect on labour market interaction and hardly influenced market deregulation it increased however within country income inequality the consequences of globalisation thus turn out to be overall much more favourable than often conjectured in the public discourse

divided government versus incumbency externality effect quasi experimental evidence on multiple voting decisions abstract this paper explores the causal relationship between vote outcomes in different elections we ask 1 does the partisan identity of the mayor influence the voter s decision in subsequent town council elections 2 do voters condition their vote for the mayor on the result of the last council election the analysis mainprod type flply relies on a regression discontinuity design focusing on close election outcomes based on municipal level data for germany we find that the party of the mayor can receive a significant bonus in the next town council election moreover voters punish mayor candidates of parties that performed strongly in earlier council elections throughout the paper we highlight how these findings can be related to an incumbency externality effect and to the theory of divided government

health spending and public pension evidence from panel data abstractthis article empirically investigates the determinants of aggregate health expenditure in a panel of oecd countries from 1980 to 2005 we differ from most existing studies by testing some new determinants motivated by recent theoretical advances in the literature we find that a one percentage increase in public pension payments per elderly person leads to approximately a one third percentage increase in aggregate health spending and this effect is significant and robust across a variety of model specifications a back of the envelope calculation based on this estimate suggests that the expansion of the public pension programme on average accounts for approximately over one fifth of the rise in aggregate health expenditure as a share of gdp in the set of oecd countries during 1980 2005 in addition we find that the estimated effect of gdp per capita in our model ranges from 0 66 to 0 80 which is consistent with the results from some recent studies and thus further reinforces the finding in the

did globalization restrict partisan politics an empirical evaluation of social expenditures in a panel of oecd countries this paper evaluates empirically how in the course of globalization partisan politics affected social expenditures in a panel of oecd countries i introduce an updated indicator of government ideology and investigate its interaction with the kof index of globalization two basic results emerge first at times when globalization proceeded at an average pace partisan politics had no effect on social expenditures but leftist governments increased social expenditures when globalization was proceeding rapidly second policies differed in the 1980s and 1990s leftist governments pursued expansionary policies in the 1980s yet partisan politics disappeared in the 1990s but not because of globalization

conversion factor instability in international comparisons of health care expenditure parkin mcguire and yule 1987 hereafter pmy report that a regression of per capita health care expenditure on per capita income using different conversion factors exchange rates gdp ppps health ppps gave rise to different results in this note we apply updated data to the same empirical relationship in contrast to pmy we find no noticeable conversion factor instability in that relationship either with respect to the health care income elasticity or with the magnitude of multiple correlation coefficient

competitive equilibrium with search frictions a general equilibrium approach abstract when the trading process is characterized by search frictions traders may be rationed so markets need not clear we build a general equilibrium model with transferable utility where the uncertainty arising from rationing is incorporated in the definition of a commodity in the spirit of the arrow debreu theory prices of commodities then depend not only on their physical characteristics but also on the probability that their trade is rationed the standard definition of competitive equilibrium is extended by replacing the market clearing condition with an exogenous matching function which describes a trading technology that is not frictionless as is typical in search models the matching function relates the rationing probabilities of buyers and sellers to the ratio of buyers to sellers in the market when search frictions vanish our model is equivalent to the continuous assignment model of gretsky et al 20 we adapt their approach which uses linear programming techniques and duality theory to show that a competitive equilibrium exists and is constrained efficient in our environment our competitive equilibrium notion is equivalent to that of directed or competitive search the strength of our formulation and the linear programming approach is that they allow us to generalize the constrained efficiency and existence results in the directed search literature to a much broader class of economies our framework also opens the door to the use of existing algorithms for computing equilibria and taking these models to the data

competitive pricing and efficiency in search equilibrium we consolidate and generalize some results on price determination and efficiency in search equilibrium extending models by rubinstein and wolinsky and by gale heterogeneous buyers and sellers meet according to a general matching technology and prices are determined by a general bargaining condition when the discount rate r and search costs converge to 0 we show that prices in all exchanges are the same and equal the competitive market clearing price given positive search costs efficiency obtains iff bargaining satisfies hosios condition and r 0 when prices are set by third party market makers however we show that search equilibrium is necessarily efficient

is german domestic social policy politically controversial this paper investigates empirically the influence of government ideology on social policy using german data examining the funding and the benefits of social security and public healthcare policy my results suggest that policies implemented by governments dominated by left and rightwing parties were similar over the 1951 2007 period leftwing governments however spent more in the 1970s and rightwing governments did so after german reunification in 1990 since policy convergence encourages new parties to enter the political arena and party platforms on social policy matters are likely to undergo further changes in light of demographic change the observed pattern may thus be a transitory phenomenon

an econometric analysis of health care expenditure a cross section study of the oecd countries this paper is an empirical examination of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure the paper presents a systematic analysis of relationships across 19 oecd countries showing the effects of aggregate income institutional and socio demographic factors on health care expenditure the results indicate that institutional factors of the health systems in addition to per capita gross domestic product gdp contribute significantly to the explanation of the health care expenditure variation between countries for example the way physicians in outpatient care are paid and the mixture of public private funding and inpatient outpatient care

ex ante price offers in matching games non steady states a matching problem is considered in which sellers can publicly commit to a trading price that differs from the price at which buyers expect to trade elsewhere in the market when demand and supply are nearly equal the equilibrium ex ante price offer lies below the price associated with the nash bargaining split this relationship reverses when the level of excess demand is large sellers always have an incentive to make ex ante offers when prices elsewhere are determined by nash bargaining this can be interpreted to mean that nash bargaining is an unstable pricing institution copyright 1991 by the econometric society

the size and composition of government expenditure abstract this paper tests several leading hypotheses on determinants of government expenditure the purpose is to avoid omitted variables bias by testing the prominent theories in a comprehensive specification to identify persistent puzzles for the current set of theories and to explore those puzzles in greater depth by looking at the composition of government expenditure and the level of government at which it takes place as well as its magnitude using government financial statistics data from the imf covering over 100 countries from 1970 2000 i look at cross sectional and inter temporal variation in government expenditure and both individual categories of expenditure such as defense education health care and different levels of government central and local among other results i find a new explanation for wagner s law widespread evidence that preference heterogeneity leads to decentralization rather than outright decreases in expenditures that a great deal of the expenditure associated with increased trade openness is not in categories that explicitly insure for risk and evidence that both political access and income inequality affect the extent of social insurance

robust determinants of health care expenditure growth our aim is to disclose robust explanatory variables for health care expenditure hce growth by introducing to this field of research a method that is especially well suited for situations of model uncertainty the extreme bounds analysis eba we analyse data for 33 oecd countries over the period 1970 2010 and include as far as it is statistically feasible all macroeconomic and institutional determinants of hce growth in the eba that have been suggested in the literature furthermore we analyse to what extent outliers in the data influence the results our results confirm earlier findings that gdp growth and a variable representing baumol s cost disease theory emerge as robust and statistically significant determinants of hce growth depending on whether or not outliers are excluded we find up to six additional robust drivers the growth in expenditure on health administration the change in the share of inpatient expenditure in total health expenditure the lagged government share in gdp t

directed search on the job heterogeneity and aggregate fluctuations we study a labor market where workers search for jobs both on the job and off the job in the model there are aggregate productivity shocks and match specific shocks we outline the proof of existence of an equilibrium which we call a block recursive equilibrium bre in which individuals decisions and market tightness are independent of the distribution of workers over wages or contracts a critical assumption that is responsible for a bre to exist is that search is directed by firms posting of contracts we explain why a bre does exist under the assumption of directed search and why it does not under the assumption of random search finally we generalize the proof of existence of a bre to allow workers to be ex ante heterogeneous with respect to some observable characteristics such as education and skill this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the determinants and effects of health expenditure in developed countries previous studies of international differences in health spending have been restricted to the use of relatively small samples of cross sectional data our objective here is to re examine the results of previous work using a sample of 560 pooled time series and cross section observations results confirm the importance of gdp as a determinant of health spending with an estimated income elasticity at or around unity but also suggest that oecd countries should not be regarded as a single homogeneous group the importance of some non income variables is also confirmed although the direct effect of these factors appears to be small

valuing changes in health risks a comparison of alternative measures essential to efficient provision of health safety and the environment is correct valuation of risks to human health in a world of scarcity difficult decisions concerning tradeoffs between health and other desirables are unavoidable in this paper we develop a model of health investment under uncertainty which yields a general expression for values of changes in risks to human health the preference based values of morbidity risks and mortality risks are ex ante dollar equivalents of changes in expected utility associated with risk changes the preference based values are related to two alternative measures costs of illness and preventive expenditures which are thought to be lower bounds on the value of risk reductions we demonstrate that these alternative measures are not even special cases of the more general measure and that the size relationships among the three measures are complex also we derive the relationship between the willingness to pay for risk changes and the consumer surpluses associated with health changes which occur with certainty the next section contains a brief review of the approaches to valuing changes in health

mobility costs frictional unemployment and efficiency with imperfect job information flows it is plausible that the distribution of job offerings becomes more attractive when there are more vacancies and more unemployed with word of mouth communication this condition is derived given this condition steady state equilibrium is not efficient with welfare increased by the introduction of unemployment compensation even though all agents are risk neutral in this way workers become more selective in the jobs they accept

on the equivalence of walrasian and non walrasian equilibria in contract markets the case of complete contracts this paper explores two models of an economy in which contracts are exchanged in the first model contracts are exchanged on a competitive market in which traders expectations concerning conditions that prevail within specific markets adjust until markets clear in the second model contract designers compete directly against one another by offering alternate contracts it is shown that walrasian allocations correspond with the equilibrium allocations in the model with direct competition when the number of traders is made large furthermore the expectational assumptions that drive the walrasian analysis coincide with off the equilibrium path conjectures in the problem with direct competition