efficiency of the medical care industry evidence from the italian regional system abstract what might be the relation between clinical research and efficiency of medical care suppliers is the hypothesis of a positive relation consistent considering efficiency as the supplier s ability to maximize the number of patients hospitalized in a mobility process among regions i e mobility balance this work aims at highlighting the existence of a positive externality of pharmaceutical clinical research on that kind of efficiency in other words an externality is able to affect the patients perception of good bad quality of outputs supplied by the medical care industry leading their mobility process taking italy and the mobility of patients among regions into account an operational research study will be performed in order to support this assumption the goal of this work is to show an alternative way to increase the efficiency of medical care suppliers on the market of health care that is to say through their competitiveness on the market of human experimentation

examining the role of economic opportunity and amenities in explaining population redistribution abstract this paper develops a model of migration integrating equilibrium and disequilibrium components in which individuals and firms form rational expectations about future opportunities levels of migration are derived as functions of variations in factors influencing migrant labor demand economic opportunity and migrant labor supply residential amenities the model is used to estimate the extent to which migration in the united states over the period 1950 1980 is determined by these two classes of exogenous factors

the determinants of efficiency and productivity in the swiss insurance industry abstract using state of the art frontier efficiency methodologies we study the efficiency and productivity of swiss insurance companies in the life property casualty and reinsurance sectors from 1997 2013 in this context we provide the first empirical analysis of internationalization strategies of insurance companies a topic of high interest in the business and economics literature but one that has to date not been the focus of efficiency studies in the insurance sector we find that productivity and efficiency have improved with regard to property casualty and reinsurance in the case of life insurance productivity and efficiency diminished however life insurance firms with higher levels of international business exhibit superior efficiency levels we observe that diversification strategies directed to the european market are more beneficial compared to those targeting markets outside of europe

the value of air quality in chinese cities evidence from labor and property market outcomes using a dual market sorting model of workers location decisions this paper studies the capitalization of air pollution in wages and property prices across chinese cities to account for endogeneity of air pollution in the determination of wages and property prices we exploit quasi experimental variation in air quality induced by a policy subsidizing coal based winter heating in northern china and document a discontinuity in average air quality for cities located north and south of the policy boundary using data for all 288 chinese cities in 2011 we estimate an equilibrium relationship between wages and house prices for the entire system of chinese cities and specify a regression discontinuity design to quantify how variation in air quality induced by the policy affects this relationship locally our preferred estimates of the elasticity of wages and house prices with respect to text pm 10 concentration are 0 53 and 0 71 respectively at the average of our sample the willingness to pay for a unit reduction in text pm 10 concentration is cny 261 28 simeq usd 40 50 with a significant share reflected in labor market outcomes

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

a nation of gamblers real estate speculation and american history the great housing convulsion that buffeted america between 2000 and 2010 has historical precedents from the frontier land boom of the 1790s to the skyscraper craze of the 1920s but this time was different there was far less far less real uncertainty about fundamental economic and geographic trends making the convulsion even more puzzling during historic and recent booms sensible models could justify high prices on the basis of seemingly reasonable projections about stable or growing prices the recurring error appears to be a failure to anticipate the impact that elastic supply will eventually have on prices whether for cotton in alabama in 1820 or land in las vegas in 2006 buyers don t appear to be irrational but rather cognitively limited investors who work with simple heuristic models instead of a comprehensive general equilibrium framework low interest rates rarely seem to drive price growth under priced default options are a more common contributor to high prices the primary cost of booms has not typically been overbuilding but rather the financial chaos that accompanies housing downturns

wage gaps large and small author affiliation barry t hirsch barry t hirsch is the w j usery chair of the american workplace department of economics andrew young school of policy studies georgia state university atlanta ga 30302 3992 and research fellow iza bonn germany bhirsch gsu eduthis presidential address was presented at the annual meeting of the southern economic association new orleans la on november 20 2007 acknowledgment i thank the many economists with whom i have interacted or coauthored over the years in particular john addison chris bollinger bill breit bill johnson dave macpherson and ed schumacher barry t hirsch w j usery chair of the american workplace department of economics andrew young school of policy studies georgia state university 2007 president of the southern economic association figure omitted see article image 1 introductionin the wealth of nations adam smith posited theory and institutional explanations for why wages differ modern labor economics has retained a focus on wage differentials although much of the literature is unabashedly empirical it is informed by theory neoclassical economics including human capital theory remains the principal approach although labor economists recognize the role played by human nature workplace incentives institutions and public policy in wage determination in this address i highlight several topics i have studied all involving wage gaps 1 these include census imputation methods union premiums product market regulation wages in male and female jobs the wage effects of military service and interarea wages and cost of living the purpose is not to trumpet my work although it may appear as such but to draw broader conclusions about labor economists understanding of wage determination 2 equalizing differentials and the law of one wagethe theory of equalizing differentials states that in competitive labor markets workers with similar skills working in similarly attractive jobs and locations should receive similar compensation long run wage differentials are explained by differences in skill and job disamenities with a single price wage conditional on worker and job attributes 2 the law of one wage equal compensation for equivalent workers and jobs follows naturally from competitive theory empirical studies attempt to test the law of one price in product markets industrial organization economists focus on a narrow set of homogeneous goods in markets with low cost information and similar transportation costs i e purchases of electronics and books at internet sites international economists test for purchasing power parity for homogeneous goods i e big mac prices across countries for a recent paper see parsley and wei 2007 even in these markets there is considerable deviation from the law of one price one does not see an equivalent literature in labor economics yes there is a vast literature on wage gaps but authors rarely characterize such work as a test of a law of one wage because there is little expectation that there should be wage equality even conditional on controls why not first as emphasized in personnel economics pay schemes that maximize profits often involve wages deviating from spot marginal products thus creating competitive wage differences across similar workers in similar jobs lazear and oyer 2007 second unions or other institutions can affect wages third there are rigidities in labor markets owing to imperfect mobility say from information and search costs firm specific training personal job attachment or tied household decisions regarding jobs location and housing manning 2003 mortensen 2003 fourth are problems of measurement leading to apparent variation in wages even when there is none and fifth even if data are error free we cannot hope to measure all the multitude of worker and job attributes that influence wages

can eliminating school fees in poor districts boost enrollment evidence from south africa abstractthe charging of school user fees is a much debated policy issue in developing countries in this paper i evaluate the impact of a south african fee elimination program that was targeted at the poorest two quintiles of schools based on a community poverty score fixed effects estimates find that the program increased enrollment by almost 2 percentage points in treated secondary schools an increase concentrated in earlier secondary grades there is substantial heterogeneity in the estimated secondary school effect it is driven entirely by an increase of around 3 5 percentage points in the poorer of the two treated quintiles regression discontinuity estimates confirm that the relatively wealthy schools near the treatment cutoff did not experience any effects on enrollment overall the abolition of fees seems to have been reasonably effective in increasing secondary school enrollment in particularly poor communities this is despite the fact that the eliminated fees were relatively low comprisin

urban population and amenities the neoclassical model of location we develop a neoclassical general equilibrium model to explain cross metro variation in population and density we provide new methods to estimate traded and non traded productivities and elasticities of housing and land supply using density and land area data from wage and housing cost indices the model explains half of u s density and population variation and finds that quality of life determines location choices more than trade productivity productivity and factor substitution in housing matter most but are weak in nicer areas relaxing land use regulations would increase population in the west raising both quality of life and productivity experienced by residents

measuring the joint impact of governance form and economic regulation on airport efficiency abstract this paper examines the joint impact that governance structure and economic regulation has on airport efficiency the previous literature has focused on one or the other of these factors but not both the empirical investigation uses a semi parametric bayesian distance stochastic frontier model as well as a data envelopment analysis dea model based on a panel of airports in several countries we find that the form of economic regulation is relatively more important than the type of governance in affecting efficiency the article provides measures of changes in expected efficiency when either or both the governance form and price regulation changes

under pressure how the business environment affects productivity and efficiency of european life insurance companies deregulation and widespread economic changes have fundamentally affected the business environment of european life insurance companies over the last decades we apply multi stage data envelopment analysis to identify the impact of the changing environment on productivity and efficiency of european life insurance companies considering a sample of 970 life insurance companies from 14 european countries we show that general economic capital market and insurance market conditions are important drivers of efficiency although we find no technical change in the european life insurance sector we nonetheless observe an efficiency increase in 2002 2013 that leads to an increase in total factor productivity these trends can be explained by more challenging business conditions in the 2000s our results emphasize the need to control for the business environment in cross country efficiency studies

organizational form and efficiency the coexistence of stock and mutual property liability insurers this article introduces a new approach cross frontier analysis for estimating the relative efficiency of alternative organizational forms in an industry the technique is illustrated by analyzing a sample of stock and mutual property liability insurers using nonparametric frontier efficiency methods cross frontier analysis measures the relative efficiency of each organizational form by computing the efficiency of each stock mutual firm relative to a reference set consisting of all mutual stock firms we test agency theoretic hypotheses about organizational form including the managerial discretion and expense preference hypotheses the results indicate that stocks and mutuals are operating on separate production and cost frontiers and thus represent distinct technologies consistent with the managerial discretion hypothesis the stock technology dominates the mutual technology for producing stock outputs and the mutual technology dominates the stock technology for producing mutual outputs however consistent with the expense preference hypothesis the stock cost frontier dominates the mutual cost frontier our findings thus suggest a richer interpretation of organizational form than provided by previous researchers

the effect of organizational structure on efficiency evidence from the spanish insurance industry this paper provides new information on the effects of organizational structure on efficiency by analyzing spanish stock and mutual insurers over the period 1989 1997 we test the efficient structure hypothesis which predicts that the market will sort organizational forms into market segments where they have comparative advantages and the expense preference hypothesis which predicts that mutuals will be less efficient than stocks technical cost and revenue frontiers are estimated using data envelopment analysis the results indicate that stocks and mutuals are operating on separate production cost and revenue frontiers and thus represent distinct technologies in cost and revenue efficiency stocks of all sizes dominate mutuals in the production of stock output vectors and smaller mutuals dominate stocks in the production of mutual output vectors larger mutuals are neither dominated by nor dominant over stocks in the cost and revenue comparisons thus large mutuals appear to be vulnerable to competition from stock insurers in spain overall the results are consistent with the efficient structure hypothesis but are generally not consistent with the expense preference hypothesis

efficiency in the greek insurance industry this paper employs the two stage procedure of simar and wilson 2007 to analyse the effects of deregulation on the efficiency of the greek insurance industry the efficiency is estimated by means of data envelopment analysis dea the companies are ranked according to their crs efficiency score for the period 1994 2003 the first stage results indicate a decline in efficiency over the sample period while the second stage results confirm that the competition for market shares is a major driver of efficiency in the greek insurance industry

organization and efficiency in the international insurance industry a cross frontier analysis abstract this paper employs cross frontier analysis an innovative tool based on data envelopment analysis to provide new insight into the relationship between organization and efficiency in international insurance markets we are the first to empirically test the expense preference hypothesis and the efficient structure hypothesis in a large cross country study for this purpose we consider 23 807 firm years for 21 countries from northern america and the european union a dataset not previously analyzed in this context we find evidence for the efficient structure hypothesis in selected market segments but we find no evidence for the expense preference hypothesis our results provide insight into the competitiveness of stock and mutual insurers from different countries at the country level the results can be used to compare different insurance markets our findings are especially interesting for the strategic management of insurance companies as well as for regulators and boards of national insurance associations

changes in the cost of intermediation the case of savings and loans the minimum cost output configuration for a firm may change as the result of a variety of factors including changes in market structure in this paper we test this structural change hypothesis with savings and loan data we find support for the hypothesis that separable constant returns to scale production functions characterize the average savings and loan in our sample in 1983 this is in contrast to the cost complementarities found in 1978 we argue that this result may be the result of regulatory changes that allowed savings and loans to alter their production mix to fully capture the benefits of joint production it seems reasonable to assume that the cost minimizing configuration of a multiproduct firm is potentially subject to nonstationarity during periods of structural change in input and or output markets the late 1970s and early 1980s represent such a period of turbulence for many markets in the financial services industry volatile interest rates combined with technological and regulatory changes may have caused firms in this industry to alter their output mixes in an effort to capture cost complementarities from joint production the purpose of this paper is to test this hypothesis of structural change in the savings and loan industry using both a translog and minflex laurent translog mlt specification of the production function we have chosen to investigate savings and loans s ls during the late 1970s and early 1980s for two reasons first s ls provide an ideal vehicle for testing our hypothesis because they were restricted almost exclusively to mortgages and securities as outputs before the passage of the depository institutions deregulation and monetary control act of 1980 and the garn st germain act of 1982 moreover there were also market changes with respect to both the pricing and mix of inputs i e deposits our second rationale involves the fact that there is a large and growing body of literature in the area of what is now called the

cities skills and regional change glaeser e l ponzetto g a m and tobio k cities skills and regional change regional studies one approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships such as zipf s or gibrat s law an alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies this paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the united states and finds that few if any growth relationships remain constant including gibrat s law education does a reasonable job of explaining urban resilience in recent decades but it does not seem to predict county growth a century ago after reviewing this evidence a simple model of regional change is presented and estimated where education increases the level of entrepreneurship human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce more product varieties and thereby increase labour demand it is found that skills are associated with growth in productivity or entrepreneurship not

the demand for primary schooling in madagascar price quality and the choice between public and private providers abstract we estimate a discrete choice model of primary schooling and simulate policy alternatives for rural madagascar among school quality factors the results highlight the negative impacts on schooling demand of poor facility quality and the use of multigrade teaching several grades being taught simultaneously by one teacher in public schools simulations indicate the feasibility of reducing multigrade in public schools by adding teachers and classrooms a policy that would lead to modest improvements in overall enrollments and would disproportionately benefit poor children given much higher price elasticities for poorer households raising school fees to cover some of the additional costs would strongly counteract these favorable distributional outcomes an alternative policy of consolidation of primary schools combined with multigrade reduction or other quality improvements is likely to be ineffective because of the strongly negative impact of distance to school

education and the poverty trap an overlapping generations model is constructed in which individual wealth is related to educational attainment and in which liquidity constraints may induce children to invest in a sub optimal level of education given their ability financing for education is obtained from within the family abilities differ among children and may be related to parental ability stationary state equilibria are found to exist in which children of poorer families are caught in a poverty trap because of an inability to finance their education the role of redistributive policy is studied in this context

the rise of the sunbelt in the last 50 years population and incomes have increased steadily throughout much of the sunbelt this paper assesses the relative contributions of rising productivity rising demand for southern amenities and increases in housing supply to the growth of warm areas using data on income housing price and population growth before 1980 economic productivity increased significantly in warmer areas and drove the population growth in those places since 1980 productivity growth has been more modest but housing supply growth has been enormous we infer that new construction in warm regions represents a growth in supply rather than demand from the fact that prices are generally falling relative to the rest of the country the relatively slow pace of housing price growth in the sunbelt relative to the rest of the country and relative to income growth also implies that there has been no increase in the willingness to pay for sun related amenities as such it seems that the growth of the sunbelt has little to do with the sun

an efficiency comparison of the non life insurance industry in the bric countries abstract we analyze the efficiency of non life insurance companies in four of the fastest growing markets in the world the bric brazil russia india china countries an innovative feature of this paper is its incorporation of uncontrollable variables in the efficiency analysis using multi stage data envelopment analysis dea this approach captures cross country differences such as the political and economic environment and allows distinguishing between managerial inefficiency and inefficiency due to environmental conditions we find that the environment affects the efficiency of non life insurers operating in the bric countries furthermore in a regression of firm characteristics on efficiency scores we identify four drives of efficiency size profitability solvency and ownership form the results further our understanding of the insurance industry in the bric countries in regard to its efficiency and the environment in which it operates

housing booms and city centers popular discussions often treat the great housing boom of the 1996 2006 period as if it were a national phenomenon with similar impacts across locales but across metropolitan areas price growth was dramatically higher in warmer less educated cities with less initial density and higher initial housing values within metropolitan areas price growth was faster in neighborhoods closer to the city center the centralization of price growth during the boom was particularly dramatic in those metropolitan areas where income is higher away from the city center we consider a number of different explanations for this connection and find that the connection between centralized price growth and decentralized income seems to be most explained by the faster price growth in central cities that use relatively more public transit

technical efficiency of european railways a distance function approach this study has two principal objectives the first objective is to measure and compare the performance of european railways the second objective is to illustrate the usefulness of econometric distance functions in the analysis of production in multioutput industries where behavioural assumptions such as cost minimization or profit maximization are unlikely to be applicable using annual data on 17 railways companies during 1988 1993 multioutput distance functions are estimated using corrected ordinary least squares cols the resulting technical efficiency estimates range from 0 980 for the netherlands to 0 784 for italy with a mean of 0 863 the distance function results are also compared with those obtained from single output production functions where aggregate output measures are formed using either total revenue or a tornqvist index the results obtained indicate substantial differences in parameter estimates and technical efficiency rankings casting significant doubt upon the reliability of

x efficiency in the us life insurance industry abstract using six years of data 1985 1990 we estimate hybrid translog cost functions for 561 life insurers we examine the resulting residuals to determine the relative efficiency of insurers in the sample we then test the residuals to see if they are related to so called x efficiencies because of internal and external monitoring or to other factors related to rent seeking results show a large degree of persistent inefficiency seems to exist among sample firms the inefficiencies relate to some internal or external monitoring and rent seeking may be occurring

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

insurance companies in mozambique a two stage dea and neural networks on efficiency and capacity slacks this article analyses the efficiency of mozambique insurance companies using a dea model two dea models are used and a bootstrap approach adopted furthermore the efficiency scores are predicted based on neural networks the results reveal that mozambique insurance companies output increasing potentials are severely constrained particularly in terms of the ceded reinsurance increasing potentials policy implications are derived

the regional transformation of the american economy this paper describes the rather remarkable and dramatic changes which have occurred in recent decades in the economic fortunes of the various regions of my country the usa i thought of three reas

measuring cost efficiency in the property liability insurance industry abstract escalating prices and periodic availability problems in property liability insurance markets are often attributed to insurance company inefficiency and lax claims settlement practices this paper investigates these issues by estimating stochastic cost frontiers for three size stratified samples of property liability insurers over the period 1980 1988 a translog cost function and input share equations are estimated using maximum likelihood techniques the results show that large insurers operate in a narrow range around an average efficiency level of about 90 percent relative to their cost frontier efficiency levels for medium and small insurers are about 80 and 88 percent in relation to their respective frontiers wider variations in efficiency are present for these two groups in comparison with large insurers large insurers slightly over produce loss settlement services while small and medium size insurers under produce this output the small and intermediate size groups are characterized by economies of scale suggesting the potential for cost reductions from consolidations in the industry