government deficits the real interest rate and ldc debt on global crowding out abstract the paper uses a three regions model of global saving investment balance to present a global crowding out interpretation of present economic trends the model builds on data which point to a possible shortage of savings explosive growth of social expenditures structural public sector deficit in north and south changes of the age pyramid real wage rigidity in many industrial countries

the input output approach to instrument selection this article proposes a new method of selecting demand shift instruments for disaggregated industries i use prior information from input output tables to identify industries whose output fluctuations are likely to function as approximately exogenous demand shocks for other industries after motivating this idea theoretically i implement the input output approach using data from the 1977 detailed input output study i conduct a systematic instrument search for over 450 u s manufacturing industries and find over 200 industries possessing plausible instruments i conclude with a brief application showing how input output instruments can be used to estimate the short run supply curve of the cement industry

supply shocks in a two country world with wage and price rigidities the implications of quantity adjustments in the face of sticky prices in open economy macroeconomic models have been introduced by dixit i978 neary i980 and dixit and norman i980 the first two employ the small country assumption that the foreign price level is an exogenous variable with the latter including a non traded good into the discussion dixit and norman introduce a two country one good model and only consider a generalised keynesian outcome under fixed exchange rates in this paper we analyse a two country two good model and consider the international link between unemployment in both countries with special emphasis on supply shock originated disequilibria under fixed and flexible exchange rates naturally the terms of trade become an important transmission mechanism in a two good model under flexible exchange rates the work of barro and grossman i976 malinvaud i977 et al for closed economies has shown that temporary equilibria in a closed economy can be classified into regions of keynesian unemployment classical unemployment repressed inflation and under consumption when two countries linked by trade are discussed the classification of international temporary equilibria multiplies accordingly we choose a small subset of these possibilities focusing on those that are likely to be associated with supply shocks i e combinations of keynesian and classical unemployment two country models have been extensively studied under walrasian and simple keynesian specifications see for instance laursen and metzler i950 harberger i95i meade i95i mundell i968 swoboda and dornbusch i973 and mussa i979 we consider these models briefly in section iii emphasising their micro foundations and general equilibrium properties stability of both fixed and flexible exchange rates regimes for walrasian and keynesian equilibria revolves around some form of the marshall lerner conditions being satisfied the problem of competitive devaluations to export unemployment in a keynesian world is discussed while a keynesian outcome for both countries applies for some configurations of wages and product prices and exchange rates this is not true for all configurations hence with sticky prices monetary deflation in both countries should lead to keynesian unemployment in both but when negative supply shocks reduce national labour demands and output supplies keynesian aggregate demands cease to determine the levels of economic activity and employment appropriately

behavioral hazard in health insurance a fundamental implication of standard moral hazard models is overuse of low value medical care because copays are lower than costs in these models the demand curve alone can be used to make welfare statements a fact relied on by much empirical work there is ample evidence though that people misuse care for a different reason mistakes or behavioral hazard much high value care is underused even when patient costs are low and some useless care is bought even when patients face the full cost in the presence of behavioral hazard welfare calculations using only the demand curve can be off by orders of magnitude or even be the wrong sign we derive optimal copay formulas that incorporate both moral and behavioral hazard providing a theoretical foundation for value based insurance design and a way to interpret behavioral nudges once behavioral hazard is taken into account health insurance can do more than just provide financial protection it can also improve health care efficiency jel codes d03 i12 i13 i30 i38

can labor market policies reduce deaths of despair do minimum wages and the earned income tax credit eitc mitigate rising deaths of despair we leverage state variation in these policies over time to estimate event study and difference in differences models of deaths due to drug overdose suicide and alcohol related causes our causal models find no significant effects on drug or alcohol related mortality but do find significant reductions in non drug suicides a 10 percent minimum wage increase reduces non drug suicides among low educated adults by 2 7 percent and the comparable eitc figure is 3 0 percent placebo tests and event study models support our causal research design increasing both policies by 10 percent would likely prevent a combined total of more than 700 suicides each year

energy price shocks and medium term business cycles abstract energy price shocks pose sudden challenges to economies this paper examines how oil price shocks have influenced the u s economy over the last decades and especially focuses on the productivity slowdown in the years following an oil price shock we extend the existing literature by considering medium term business cycles which consist of high frequency components conventional business cycles up to 8 years and medium frequency components 8 50 years we find that the medium frequency consequences of energy price shocks are considerable and explain a significant part of the productivity slowdown

coping with a decline in energy prices macroeconomic and income distribution effects in thailand after the two first oil price shocks economists policy makers and the public got used to increases in energy prices and they expected them to continue in 1982 when the oil prices dropped all expectations needed to be revised and adjustments to the new conditions needed to be considered this paper analyzes growth macroeconomic employment and income distribution implications of a decline in oil prices using the second infrastructure asset management project siam2 alternative policies with respect to domestic energy prices is simulated the outcome of the analysis is that growth is not much affected by changes in energy prices the macroeconomic resource balance however and especially the current account deficit is sensitive dropping the domestic prices of energy with the world prices will help more employment in the formal sector real incomes per capita of all categories of households benefit in various degrees from a drop in domestic prices however if one is concerned about foreign debt accumulation and if sustained and accelerating growth is desired it will be preferable not to drop the domestic price with the world prices

a welfare measure of offset effects in health insurance abstract changing health insurance coverage for one service may affect use of other insured services when improving coverage for one service reduces use of another the savings are referred to as offset effects for example costs of better coverage for prescription drugs may be partly offset by reductions in hospital costs offset effects have welfare implications but it has not been clear how to value these impacts in design of health insurance we show that plan paid rather than total spending is the right welfare measure of the offset effect and go on to develop a sufficient statistic for evaluating the welfare effects of change in coverage in the presence of multiple goods we derive a simple rule for when a coverage improvement increases welfare due to offset effects

measuring the impacts of teachers ii teacher value added and student outcomes in adulthood abstract are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality this question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value ad

price changes in the euro area and the united states some facts from individual consumer price data prices of goods and services do not adjust immediately in response to changing demand and supply conditions this paper characterizes the average frequency and size of price changes in the euro area and its member countries investigates the determinants of the probability of price changes and compares the evidence for the euro area with available u s results the facts documented in this paper are based on evidence from individual price data recorded at the store level in all euro area countries except ireland and greece that is in datasets covering austria belgium finland france germany italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal and spain which together account for around 97 percent of euro area gdp the data used are the monthly price records underlying the computation of national consumer price indices and harmonized consumer price indices these data cover a large number of products selected on the basis of extensive household budget surveys

inflation and social consensus in the seventies it is widely believed that the two oil price shocks of the i 970s played a major role in the increase in inflation in industrial countries while this hypothesis is consistent with the timing of changes in inflation at the global level it seems to break down when applied to individual countries cross sectionally for example over the period i973 9 switzerland had an average inflation rate of 4 7 while in neighbouring italy inflation averaged i5 6 over the same period furthermore inflation in the pre opec period i97i 2 was actually higher in switzerland than in italy it seems that a supply shock explanation of inflation in the seventies also requires an explanation of why different countries responded so differently to a similar set of shocks at the world level the purpose of this paper is to offer such an explanation and to test the hypothesis with a cross sectional equation accounting for differences in average inflation rates over the period i973 9 in eighteen oecd countries this time period includes the year of the first opec shock i 973 and the following six years up to the time of the second opec shock the hypothesis to be tested is set in the framework of a model similar to that of brunner et al i 980 the key features of the brunner model are that the adjustment of real wage expectations is subject to lags and that labour supply is positively related to the difference between the perceived real wage and the expected or target real wage given these two assumptions a negative supply shock gives rise to a period of stagflation whose intensity will be greater the slower is the speed of adjustment of real wage expectations the model of this paper extends the brunner model in three ways first across countries the speed of adjustment of real wage expectations or targets is assumed to depend positively on the degree of social consensus as proxied negatively by an indicator of average long run strike activity second the model allows for the possibility of inflation inertia or systematically incorrect inflation expectations as well as a sluggish adjustment of real wage expectations third the model incorporates the hypothesis that money supply growth will vary across countries according to variations in inflationary pressures as perceived by governments the first section of the paper provides a discussion of the rationale for the key proposition regarding strikes and social consensus as well as a brief discussion of the role of wage bargaining institutions section ii develops a theoretical model which yields a reduced form cross sectional equation relating the average i 973 9

endogenous growth monetary shocks and nominal rigidities we introduce endogenous growth in a standard nk model with staggered prices and wages we find that the source of nominal rigidities the shock persistence and the type of taylor rule affect the relationship between monetary volatility and growth

does devaluation make sense in the least developed countries the exchange rate is a controversial instrument of economic policy especially in developing countries even in cases where currency overvaluation is clearly a major cause of an acute balance of payments crisis the governments of developing countries are frequently reluctant to devalue apparently for three main reasons a they doubt that export production import demand and domestic expenditures are very responsive to a change in the exchange rate elasticity pessimism b they fear the potentially disruptive side effects of devaluation on inflation employment and output growth as well as on real wages and income distribution and c they want to avoid political risk the focus of the present study is on the effects of devaluation in the deficit prone least developed countries where a large part of the population barely survives on a subsistence wage to be wholly successful devaluation generally requires a reduction of real wages to encourage the expansion of exports and of import substitution without a contraction of national income hence our lead question is devaluation an appropriate method of economic stabilization in the least developed countries where a decrease of real wages or earnings could result in severe economic hardship or even starvation more specifically the aim of our study is twofold 1 to investigate the short to medium term effects of devaluation on macroeconomic performance in the least developed countries subject to the condition that real wages or earnings

the past decade s natural rate and the dynamics of german unemployment a case against demand policy this paper attempts to highlight some recent cyclical and structural aspects of the german labor market moreover whenever possible the results of our analysis are compared with findings for the u s labor market finally policy implications which may be inferred from our study are discussed at some length research on unemployment may draw attention to at least two different but not mutually exclusive problems the cyclical movement of unemployment gives rise to concern about the amount of the unemployment rate that can be reduced by aggregate demand policy only at the cost of an accelerating inflation rate the relevant question is whether this unemployment rate has been constant during the last decade or whether it has been subject to exogenous shocks such as the oil price explosion and the productivity slowdown with this knowledge the policy maker can be advised as to what extent an expansive demand policy is an appropriate tool for achieving lower rates of unemployment without facing an accelerating inflation rate and moreover why the reduction of inflation in the seventies by restrictive demand management might cost more unemployment than in the sixties the latter query calls in question some economic policy measures in the seventies macroeconomic policy may not be able to make oil cheaper but can try to mitigate adverse secondary effects on aggregate output and employment but a recovery will not make the problem of unemployment simply disappear evenly for everyone the analysis of aggregate unemployment is silent about which group of the labor force shoulders the main burden of unemployment and is more likely to suffer from extreme low escape probabilities from unemployment if the notion of a hard core of unemployed

viewpoint the human capital approach to inference the purpose of this essay is to discuss two approaches to inference and how human capital can provide a way to combine them the first approach ubiquitous in economics is based upon the rubin holland potential outcomes model and relies upon randomized treatment to measure the causal effect of choice the second approach widely used in the pattern recognition and machine learning literatures assumes that choice conditional upon current information is optimal or at least high quality and then provides techniques to generalize observed choice to new cases the human capital approach combines these methods by using observed decisions by experts to reduce the demensionality of the feature space and allow the categorization of decisions by their propensity score the fact that the human capital of experts is heterogeneous implies that errors in decision making are inevitable moreover under the appropriate conditions these decisions are random conditional upon the propensity score this in turn allows us to identify the conditional average treatment effect for a wider class of situations than would be possible with randomized control trials this point is illustrated with data from medical decision making in the context of treating depression heart disease and adverse childbirth events

technology and the demand for imports in the pure theory of international trade traded goods are generally viewed as finished products this is in sharp contrast with the fact that the bulk of world trade is in intermediate products to reconcile theory with facts a number of models of trade in intermediate products have been proposed in recent years most of these models have been used to investigate the validity of well known trade theorems in the presence of intermediate products 2 hence most of these models are rather complex generally allowing for two factors of production and two final goods as well as for one or two pure intermediate products 3 another feature common to most of these models and that is borrowed from standard trade theory is the assumption that production is nonjoint in input quantities 4 this assumption leads to a number of remarkable theoretical results but it also greatly increases the number of possible patterns of production and of interindustry flows and it thus adds to the complexity of the models furthermore if the number of goods is larger than the number of factors nonjointness leads to indeterminacy unless additional assumptions are made 6 these assumptions typically are that some goods are not produced domestically 7 or that some goods are not traded internationally 8 this further multiplies the number of possible cases and it explains perhaps why none of the models proposed so far has emerged as the benchmark model much in the same way as for

identifying sources of inefficiency in health care in medicine the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency an alternative interpretation is that hospitals with greater expertise in a treatment use it more because of their comparative advantage suggesting that standardization is misguided a simple economic model provides an empirical framework to separate these explanations estimating this model with data for heart attack patients we find evidence of substantial variation across hospitals in both allocative inefficiency and comparative advantage with most hospitals overusing treatment in part because of incorrect beliefs about their comparative advantage a stylized welfare calculation suggests that eliminating allocative inefficiency would increase the total benefits from the treatment that we study by 44

who pays for the minimum wage this paper analyzes the eects of a large 60 and persistent increase in the minimum wage instituted in hungary in 2001 we propose a new approach to estimating the employment eects of a minimum wage increase that exploits information on the distribution of wages before and after the policy change we infer the number of jobs destroyed by comparing the number of pre reform jobs below the new minimum wage to the excess number of jobs paying at and above the new minimum wage our estimates imply that the higher minimum wage had at most a small negative eect on employment and so the main eect was pushing up wages we then use data on a large panel of firms to evaluate the economic incidence of the minimum wage increase contrary to theoretical models that attribute the small employment eects of minimum wage changes to monopsonistic wage setting we find no evidence that the rise in the minimum wage led to lower profitability among low wage employers instead we find that the costs of the minimum wage were largely passed through to consumers

the recent slowdown of productivity growth the slowdown of productivity growth in the developed countries during the seventies will in this paper be viewed as a combined effect of three closely interacting forces i a long term deterioration in the efficiency and flexibility of some basic mechanisms of the economic and political systems of these countries ii the fading away of a number of uniquely favourable circumstances for productivity growth during the fifties and sixties and iii the exposure of these economies to unusually severe macroeconomic disturbances in the seventies careful inspection of time series with attempted modifications for cyclical factors suggests that there was hardly any general slowdown of productivity growth among developed countries before approximately i972 4 1 as we know the situation is radically different since then labour productivity growth per year for the entire national economy gdp per man hour seems to have fallen between the periods i960 73 and i973 9 by about i 2 percentage points in the united states 45 by about 24 percentage points in western europe2 45 and by about 5 9 percentage points in japan 6o table i see also fig i the slowdown was of about the same size in the business and manufacturing sectors see table i to calculate the extent of the slowdown of total factor productivity growth is of course a much more hazardous matter to which i will return later if just the various system changes and the fading away of the uniquely favourable factors had been the dominating forces behind the productivity growth slowdown we would expect the slowdown to have been gradual rather than abrupt as it turned out to be this abruptness as well as its timing makes the dramatic macroeconomic disturbances around i972 4 a prime suspect when looking for the villain behind the productivity growth slowdown indeed it is a basic hypothesis of the paper that these macroeconomic disturbances were not only by themselves strongly unfavourable for productivity growth but that they also revealed and accentuated the gradual deterioration of the

energy price shocks and productivity growth in us and uk manufacturing because sustained changes in the trend of productivity growth are so very important for people s long run economic welfare the dramatic productivity growth slowdown of the 1970 s and early 1980 s has been the focus of much analysis and discussion for some observers it was much more than coincidence that the oil price shocks of 1973 74 accompanied the sharp slowdowns in traditionally measured productivity growth not only in the united states and the united kingdom but throughout the industrialised world however establishing quantifying and explaining sig nificant linkages between energy price shocks and productivity growth has proved to be most difficult traditional and time honoured relationships involving productivity growth have all seemed incapable of explaining this slowdown for example edward denison author of several widely cited productivity studies has concluded that energy had essentially no role in explaining the productivity growth slowdown and that moreover what happened is to be blunt a mystery 1979 p 4

the assessment productivity and competitiveness in british manufacturing this issue of the oxford review examines productivity and competitiveness in british manufac turing the simplest and most widely used measure of productivity is output per head from this definition sprout at once the horns of a dilemma for an economy facing unemployment on the present scale for a given rate of expansion of output the higher the rate of productivity growth the greater the decline in employment or at least the smaller its growth on the other hand in an economy open to international competition a high rate of productivity growth relative to that of other countries is the long term key to achieving the favourable international competitive po sition necessary to sustain growth and a low level of unemployment

moral hazard in insurance value based cost sharing and the benefits of blissful ignorance the conventional theory of optimal coinsurance rates for health insurance with moral hazard indicates that coinsurance should vary with the price responsiveness or price elasticity of demand for different medical services an alternative theory called value based cost sharing indicates that coinsurance should be lower for services with higher marginal benefits relative to costs this paper reconciles the two views it shows that if patient demands are based on correct information optimal coinsurance is the same under either theory if patient demands differ from informed demands optimal coinsurance depends both on information imperfection and price responsiveness value based cost sharing can be superior to providing information even if the cost of information is minimal when patient demands fall short of informed demands an extended numerical example illustrates these points

searching for the productivity slowdown some surprising findings from west german manufacturing we test the hypothesis of a negative long term trend and or a structural break in total factor productivity tfp after the first oil price shock for west german manufacturing industries within an econometric model based on a flexible cost function with capital as a quasi fixed factor after adjusting tfp growth for scale economies and varying capacity utilization this hypothesis is not supported by our empirical findings for the great majority of industries studied whereas the hypothesis that the log level of tfp follows a random walk with drift is not rejected by various statistical tests authors

the demand for capital labor and energy in european manufacturing industry before and after the oil price shocks the price and substitution elasticities for factor inputs capital labor fuels and electricity are estimated for total manufacturing industry on the basis of a pooled crosscountry time series analysis for nine west european countries the impact of the economic disturbances in the 1970s on the price sensitivity of demand is analyzed by estimating a translog cost function for two separate periods 1960 72 and 1973 80 hicks neutral technical change is rejected for both periods the results indicate some quite significant changes in the elasticities over the two periods

oil exporters disappointing diversification into resource based industry abstract resource based industry rbi proved a popular use of the oil exporting countries windfalls the feasibility studies projected sizeable resource rents which encouraged the oil exporting countries to discount risk and launch ambitious rbi strategies in fact a combination of market related parameters fell well below expectations shrinking and even eliminating potential rents this has left little margin to accommodate inefficient rbi implementation

trend inflation taylor principle and indeterminacy positive trend inflation shrinks the determinacy region of a basic new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model when monetary policy is conducted by a contemporaneous interest rate rule neither the taylor principle which requires the inflation coefficient to be greater than one nor the generalized taylor principle which requires that the nominal interest rate to be raised by more than the increase in inflation in the long run is a sufficient condition for local determinacy of equilibrium this finding holds for different types of taylor rules inertial policy rules and price indexation schemes therefore regardless of the theoretical setup the monetary literature on interest rate rules cannot disregard average inflation in both theoretical and empirical analyses

learning about monetary policy rules abstract we study macroeconomic systems with forward looking private sector agents and a monetary authority that is trying to control the economy through the use of a linear policy feedback rule we use stability under recursive learning a la evans and honkapohja learning and expectations in macroeconomics princeton university press princeton new jersey 2001 as a criterion for evaluating monetary policy rules in this context we find that considering learning can alter the evaluation of alternative policy rules

food deserts and the causes of nutritional inequality we study the causes of nutritional inequality why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the united states exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality we then estimate a structural model of grocery demand using a new instrument exploiting the combination of grocery retail chains differing presence across geographic markets with their differing comparative advantages across product groups counterfactual simulations show that exposing low income households to the same products and prices available to high income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10 while the remaining 90 is driven by differences in demand these findings counter the argument that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality

endogenous growth and the taylor principle abstract this paper analyzes conditions for equilibrium determinacy in a new keynesian model with endogenous growth endogenous growth shrinks the determinacy region considerably complying with the taylor principle is not sufficient for equilibrium determinacy

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

using differences in knowledge across neighborhoods to uncover the impacts of the eitc on earnings we develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy s marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy we apply this method to characterize the impacts of the earned income tax credit eitc on earnings using administrative tax records covering all eitc eligible lers from 19962009 we begin by developing a proxy for local knowledge about the eitc schedule the degree of sharp bunching at the exact income level that maximizes eitc refunds by individuals who report self employment income the degree of self employed sharp bunching varies signi cantly

can imperfect competition explain the difference between primal and dual productivity measures estimates for u s manufacturing it is well known that under the assumptions of constant returns to scale perfect competition and the absence of factor hoarding primal and dual productivity measures should be highly correlated the apparent lack of correlation is usually attributed to fixed factors of production in this paper i propose an alternative explanation by relaxing the assumption of perfect competition by controlling for the presence of a markup component i demonstrate that both productivity measures are in fact highly correlated for u s manufacturing the analysis also provides an alternative method of estimating a markup of prices over marginal cost that avoids certain difficulties inherent in some existing methods of estimation

the price ain t right hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured we use insurance claims data for 27 6 percent of individuals with private employer sponsored insurance in the us between 2007 and 2011 to examine the variation in health spending and in hospitals transaction prices we document the variation in hospital prices within and across geographic areas examine how hospital prices influence the variation in health spending on the privately insured and analyze the factors associated with hospital price variation four key findings emerge first health care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three across the 306 hospital referral regions hrrs in the us moreover the correlation between total spending per privately insured beneficiary and total spending per medicare beneficiary across hrrs is only 0 14 second variation in providers transaction prices across hrrs is the primary driver of spending variation for the privately insured whereas variation in the quantity of care provided across hrrs is the primary driver of medicare spending variation consequently extrapolating lessons on health spending from medicare to the privately insured must be done with caution third we document large dispersion in overall inpatient hospital prices and in prices for seven relatively homogenous procedures for example hospital prices for lower limb mris vary by a factor of twelve across the nation and on average two fold within hrrs finally hospital prices are positively associated with indicators of hospital market power even after conditioning on many demand and cost factors hospital prices in monopoly markets are 15 3 percent higher than those in markets with four or more hospitals

spillovers from gatekeeping peer effects in absenteeism abstract we study peer effects in absenteeism among workplace colleagues gatekeeping is an essential task in many insurance systems in this study we exploit exogenous shifts of general practitioners gps occurring when physicians quit or retire we find that these shifts induce changes in absenteeism for affected workers by utilizing high quality norwegian matched employer employee data with detailed individual information on certified sick leave during the period 2003 2012 we can study how the transfer of workers between gps affects co workers absenteeism we identify strong causal positive peer effects in absenteeism a one day change in focal worker sickness absence transfers to a 0 41 day shift in peer absence

optimal wage indexation and monetary policy in an economy with imported raw materials abstract an economy s openness from the input side has important effects on the optimal design of its macroeconomic policies given the exchange rate regime the larger the share of imported raw materials in domestic production the smaller the optimal degree of wage indexation to unanticipated inflation alternatively given the wage indexation parameter the larger the share of imported raw materials in domestic production the smaller the optimal degree of foreign exchange intervention by the monetary authority the more flexible the exchange rate

take up and targeting experimental evidence from snap this paper develops a framework for evaluating the welfare impact of various interventions designed to increase take up of social safety net programs in the presence of potential behavioral biases we calibrate the key parameters using a randomized field experiment in which 30 000 elderly individuals not enrolled in but likely eligible for the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap are either provided with information that they are likely eligible provided with this information and also offered assistance in applying or are in a status quo control group only 6 percent of the control group enrolls in snap over the next 9 months compared to 11 percent of the information only group and 18 percent of the information plus assistance group the individuals who apply or enroll in response to either intervention receive lower benefits and are less sick than the average enrollee in the control group the results are consistent with the existence of optimization frictions that are greater for needier individuals suggesting that the poor targeting properties of the interventions reduce their welfare gains

investment specific technological change and growth accounting greenwood et al 1997 long run implications of investment specific technological change american economic review 87 3 342 362 and 2000 the role of investment specific technological change in the business cycle european economic review 44 91 115 and hercowitz 1998 the embodiment controversy a review essay journal of monetary economics 41 217 224 have claimed that the jorgenson form of growth accounting is conceptually flawed and severely understates the importance of technological progress embodied in new capital goods for explaining growth to the contrary this paper shows that in its technology aspects their model is a special case of the jorgensonian growth accounting model what they call investment specific technological change is shown to be closely related to the more familiar concept of total factor productivity tfp growth statements about the one can be translated into statements about the other empirically differences between their conclusions and those of growth accounting studies about the extent to which embodiment explains us economic growth are found to relate more to data than to methodology

innovation and the welfare effects of public drug insurance rewarding inventors with inefficient monopoly power has long been regarded as the price of encouraging innovation prescription drug insurance escapes that trade off and achieves an elusive goal lowering static deadweight loss without reducing incentives for innovation as a result of this feature the public provision of drug insurance can be welfare improving even for risk neutral and purely self interested consumers the design of insurers cost sharing schedules can either reinforce or mitigate this result schedules that impose higher consumer cost sharing requirements on more expensive drugs help ensure that insurance subsidies translate into higher utilization rather than pure increases in manufacturer profits moreover some degree of price negotiation with manufacturers is likely to be welfare improving but the optimal degree depends on the size of such transactions costs as well as the social cost of weakening innovation incentives by lowering innovator profits these results have practical implications for the evaluation of public drug insurance programs like the us medicaid and medicare part d programs along with european insurance schemes

optimal sin taxes abstract we investigate sin taxes on unhealthy items such as fatty foods that people may by their own reckoning consume too much of we employ a standard optimal taxation framework but replace the standard assumption that all consumers have 100 self control with an assumption that some consumers may have some degree of self control problems we show that imposing taxes on unhealthy items and returning the proceeds to consumers can generally improve total social surplus because such taxes counteract over consumption by consumers with self control problems while at the same time they naturally redistribute income to consumers with no self control problems who consume less such taxes can even create pareto improvements finally we demonstrate with some simple numerical examples that even if the population exhibits relatively few self control problems optimal taxes can still be large

input price shocks and the slowdown in economic growth the case of u k manufacturing this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of input price shocks on economic growth with a focus on united kingdom manufacturing in the 1970s the theoretical model predicts a discrete decline in output and productivity after an input price rise and a longer run slowdown in productivity growth real wage growth and capital accumulation these features characterize the united kingdom and most other oecd economies after 1973 the empirical results confirm the important role of input prices in recent u k adjustment but also point to an important role for other supply and demand factors two types of explanations have been offered for the sharp deterioration in u k economic performance in the past decade focusing respectively on demand and supply factors a standard keynesian view holds that macroeconomic demand management has been either too expansionary or too contractionary and that rising unemployment and falling output reflect the burden of anti inflationary policies an alternative view holds that various supply shocks are the main source of the poor output performance in this interpretation higher raw material prices particularly oil competition from the newly industrializing countries nics and perhaps an independent decline in productivity growth all have lowered output growth and raised unemployment

quality of life and spatial dimensions of the productivity slowdown this research is concerned with explaning locational variations in the productivity slowdown within the urban manufacturing sector of the united states the observed decline in labour productivity growth rates between the 1963 73 and 1973 82 subperiods is explained on the basis of both national and location specific factors an explict hypothesis examined here is that quality of life is an important area specifc influence on productivity growth and related trends statistical analyses are conducted whereby either an aggregate amenity index or its individual amenity components are utilized to examine the importance of quality of life differentials the results suggest that these amenities particularly environmental quality may be instrumental in explanining the differncial magnitude of the productivity slowdown across urban areas additional findings generally do not confirm the importance of other factors frequently cited as contributing to inter area productivity differences a regression diagnostic an

causes of the current stagflation since 1975 labour slack has been unusually high in the oecd countries and yet inflation has not diminished the less favourable mix of unemployment and rate of change of inflation which we call stagflation is explained by a fall in the feasible rate of growth of real wages unmatched by a reduction in the constant term in phillips curve to investigate this mechanism conventional wage and price equations are estimated for 19 countries and then used for simulation stagflation has been caused in roughly equal amounts by rising relative import prices and by the fall in the rate of productivity growth in the basic model the phillips curve is assumed not to adapt to falls in feasible real wage growth but in a final section an adaptive wage equation is estimated which confirms that the process of adaptation is slow

neoclassical demand for labour functions for six major economies can real factor prices and in particular the real wage explain the level of employment over the business cycle the question is of fundamental importance for macroeconomic policy and is of course the subject of longstanding controversy dunlop i938 failed to find the expected negative relationship between employment and the wage in the data and the subsequent debate is summarised in bodkin i969 crudely the data seemed to refute the competitive model of the labour market for if product markets are competitive and firms operate on their demand curves employment should be explained by real factor prices relative to product prices the capital stock and the state of technology to explain the lack of relationship barro and grossman i97i suggested that at times mutuality reinforcing quantity constraints could emerge in labour and output markets so that firms employed fewer workers than one would predict from the level of real wages and other relative prices however recently sargent i978 has attempted with some success to rehabilitate the demand for labour function by showing that costly adjustment of the workforce obscures the current relationship between the wage and labour demand while leaving it essentially intact in his account firms adjust slowly towards an employment level which is influenced by future expected real wages which might themselves reflect the past history of real wages his paper and the related one by neftci i978 was criticised by geary and kennan i979 for using retail prices to represent output prices and they showed for a number of countries that employment could not be satisfactorily explained by the real product wage taken on its own however geary and kennan failed to allow for the simultaneous effect of the real price of raw materials in symons i 982 one of us showed that allowing for this effect the real wage has a powerful elasticity about 2 but slow acting two year mean lag negative effect of the demand for labour in british manufacturing this was strong evidence but it was not completely conclusive the model fitted well only over subperiods and whereas the various breakdowns of the model could be ascribed to firms discounting certain transient shifts in the real wage there still seemed to be scope for reasonable doubt about the results however recently andrews and nickell i 982 a b working with annual rather than quarterly data and for the british economy as a whole have developed a demand for labour function with similar dynamics and with signifi

excessive wages and the return on capital received wisdom suggests that excessive wages defined as the part of real wages that do not follow labour productivity developments are adversely associated with the return on capital this paper argues that excessive wages and profits are better thought of as responses to changes in the economic political and institutional environment and there is no a priori reason for a negative relationship between them we thus investigate whether there is a causal effect of excessive wages on capital return using aggregate panel data for 19 oecd countries for the period 1970 2000 we account for the endogeneity of excessive wages by exploiting variations in institutional and labour market characteristics our main finding is that excessive wages do not affect the return on capital this result remains robust to alternative empirical specifications and to alternative definitions of profitability and excessive wages and questions the standard advice by international economic organizations on wage moderation copyright the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

why real interest rates were so low in the 1970 s the economic turmoil of the 1970 s resulted in record postwar increases in inflation unemployment and nominal interest rates yet it was declines that were hardest to explain the average real value of a share of common stock plummeted productivity growth evaporated real interest rates measured as the spread between nominal interest rates and the inflation rate turned negative see table 1 over the past decade an explosion has occurred in the amount of attention paid to the relationship between nominal and thus real interest rates and expected inflation rates a good deal of this effort has been directed toward empirical analysis of the fisher neutrality hypothesis that nominal rates respond one for one with expected inflation rates most empirical tests of the fisher hypothesis have been bivariate interest rates were regressed on a constant and on actual or expected inflation measures estimates of the impact of inflation on interest rates in these and even in extended models are often significantly below one are often statistically imprecise and tend to be unstable over time the middle column of table i reflects this the coefficient of inflation on nominal interest rates there drops from 0 78 to 0 59 in the latter 1970 s another branch of work on nominal interest rates has concentrated on the institutional impediments to the fisher hypothesis robert mundell and james tobin demonstrate that nominal rates change by a smaller amount than the expected inflation rate does when a real balance effect exists and money pays no interest michael darby and martin feldstein on the other hand argue that nominal rates should exhibit a greater thanunity response to expected inflation due to the nature of u s income tax laws 2 here i estimate the relation between interest rates expected inflation and real forces such estimates are required for evaluating the effects of inflation on saving investment the distribution of income and the redistribution of wealth to generate estimates of the net impact of these various factors on interest rates and to avoid the identification and simultaneity problems masked but not often remedied by instrumental variables techniques i employ only exogenous regressors to buttress the argument i examine the individual links in the chain which are summarized in the reduced form the novel aspect of the model presented in section i is its addition of aggregate supply shocks to the determination of interest rates i trace the reduction in the supply of complementary factor inputs in the 1970 s to a decline in the demand for capital and therefore in real interest rates the inclusion of this supply force along with expected inflation allows one to distinguish between two offsetting effects on interest rates the depressing effect on real rates through lower investment demand and the elevating effect on nominal rates of higher expected inflation the results in section ii not only strongly support the economic and statistical importance of supply shocks on real interest rates but also resolve some longstanding interest rate puzzles allowing for the impact of factor supply produces a significant estimated response to expected inflation for a sample that ends prior to late 1960 s the magnitude assistant professor school of business administration university of california berkeley i would like to thank george akerlof robert j gordon robert a meyer joe peek janet yellen the members of the economic analysis and policy seminar at berkeley participants at the nber conference on inflation and financial markets and anonymous referees for helpful comments data resources supplied data and computational services financial support was provided by the berkeley program in finance and nsf grant ses8109093 linda pacheco supplied able research assistance errors of omission or commission are my responsibility see william gibson david pyle john carlson and thomas cargill and robert meyer 2maurice levi and john makin derive the reducedform effect of expected inflation on nominal interest rates as a function of the structural parameters

raw materials profits and the productivity slowdown a factor price frontier framework is used to clarify the analogy of an increase decrease in raw material prices with autonomous technological regress progress factor price profiles are estimated for the manufacturing sector of the united states the united kingdom germany and japan the production model in conjunction with estimates obtained from the factor price frontier attributes much of the slowdown in manufacturing productivity to the rise in relative raw material prices part of the apparent productivity riddle may have to do with the use of double deflated national accounting measures of value added which have an inherent measurement bias

imported materials prices wage policy and macroeconomic stabilization this paper analyses two simple wage rules that keep employment constant when there are shocks to the prices of imported materials one rule ties nominal wages to the gnp deflator rather than the consumer price index the second rule followed by japan after the second oil price shock ties the real wage to real gnp the paper shows the effects on output real income and other macro economic variables of choosing either rule in place of the real wage stability provided by conventional wage indexation

do larger health insurance subsidies benefit patients or producers evidence from medicare advantage a central question in the debate over privatized medicare is whether increased government payments to private medicare advantage ma plans generate lower premiums for consumers or higher profits for producers using difference in differences variation brought about by a sharp legislative change we find that ma insurers pass through 45 percent of increased payments in lower premiums and an additional 9 percent in more generous benefits we show that advantageous selection into ma cannot explain this incomplete pass through instead our evidence suggests that market power is important with premium pass through rates of 13 percent in the least competitive markets and 74 percent in the most competitive

productivity dispersion in medicine and manufacturing abstract the conventional wisdom in health economics is that large differences in average productivity across us hospitals are the result of idiosyncratic features of the healthcare sector which dull the role of market forces strikingly however we find that productivity dispersion in heart attack treatment across hospitals is if anything smaller than in narrowly defined manufacturing industries such as ready mixed concrete while this fact admits multiple interpretations it suggests that healthcare may have more in common with traditional sectors than is often assumed and relatedly that insights from research on productivity and allocation in other sectors may enrich analysis of healthcare

material productivity in food manufacturing material prices have risen in food manufacturing resulting in material productivity growth this study estimates material productivity indexes for new jersey s foodmanufacturing sector a 21 material productivity growth is indicated for the 1964 84 period the mechanism of material productivity growth is also investigated results suggest that greater material efficiency is encouraged by rising material prices wage rates and regulation and by declining food prices short run impacts on material productivity are caused by input substitution beyond the short run impacts are caused by material saving technological change in some food manufacturing subsectors higher material prices may bring lower revenues to material suppliers

raw materials profits and the productivity slowdown a complementary note raise ever since the problem was first discussed in the late 1970s there has been growing evidence that the sharp productivity slowdown of the industrial countries in the last decade must have been closely linked to the specific macroeconomic shocks of that period and could not be explained by gradual processes such as the slowing down of the technological frontier or the drying up of the sources of conventional factor supplies like land or immigrant labor in no case except possibly the united states is there evidence of a sharp slowdown in productivity growth in the 15 20 year period before 1973 a simple statistical test dates at least one major kink in the productivity growth of most countries in and around the period 1973 1975 the implied link with the sharp oil and raw material price shock of that time is further borne out by the fact that the total productivity slowdown across countries at least in manufacturing seems correlated with the relative raw material price acceleration in different countries though this is not the only direct explanatory factor bruno and sachs 1985 table 12 4 in an attempt to give a theoretical rationale for the link between the events of the 1970s and the sharp productivity slowdown several candidates offer themselves the first and most obvious one for gross output measures of productivity in a material intensive sector like manufacturing is the direct substitution in production of primary inputs against costly energy and raw materials other things being equal conventional doubledeflated base weighted measures of value added productivity will in such case impart a downward bias to the slowdown

patient cost sharing and hospitalization offsets in the elderly in the medicare program increases in cost sharing by a supplemental insurer can exert financial externalities we study a policy change that raised patient cost sharing for the supplemental insurer for retired public employees in california we find that physician visits and prescription drug usage have elasticities that are similar to those of the rand health insurance experiment hie unlike the hie however we find substantial offset effects in terms of increased hospital utilization the savings from increased cost sharing accrue mostly to the supplemental insurer while the costs of increased hospitalization accrue mostly to medicare

does devaluation cause stagflation the traditional view that devaluation tends to increase domestic real income and output has been challenged in recent years on the grounds that trade flows including factor imports are relatively insensitive to exchange rate changes especially in developing countries this paper presents a simple macro economic model in which devaluation influences real income and output both through the cost of imported inputs on the supply side of the economy and through exports imports and expenditures on the demand side statistical estimates of the structural parameters of the model for a group of ten industrial and developing countries are used to show that the demand effects dominate the cost effects in most cases thus supporting the traditional view that devaluation has positive real effects in these countries in the short to medium run est ce que la devaluation engendre la stagflation le point de vue conventionnel veut que la devaluation tende a accroitre le niveau du revenu et de la production domestiques c est un point de vue qui a ete remis en question ces dernieres annees parce que dit on les flux de commerce international y compris les flux d importation de facteurs de production semblent relativement insensibles aux changements dans le taux de change ce memoire developpe un modele macro economique simple dans lequel la devaluation influence le niveau de revenu et de production en termes reels via le co ut des facteurs de production importes du cote de l offre et via les exportations les importations et les niveaux de depenses du c6te de la demande les auteurs utilisent la calibration statistique des parametres structurels du modele pour un groupe de dix pays industrialises et en voie de developpement pour montrer que les effets du cot6 de la demande dominent les effets de cofuts dans la plupart des cas voila qui supporte le point de vue traditionnel qui veut que la devaluation ait un impact positif reel dans les pays devaluateurs a court et a moyen tenne

commodity price shocks and the business cycle structural evidence for the u s this paper evaluates the relative importance of commodity price shocks in the u s business cycle therefore we extend the standard set of business cycle shocks to include unexpected changes in commodity prices the resulting svar shows that commodity price shocks are a very important driving force of macroeconomic fluctuations second only to investment specific technology shocks particularly with respect to inflation neutral technology shocks and monetary policy shocks on the other hand seem less relevant at business cycle frequencies neutral technology shocks rather play an important role at low frequencies

first do no harm tort reform and birth outcomes in the 1980s and 1990s many states adopted tort reforms it has been argued that these reforms have reduced the practice of defensive medicine arising from excess tort liability we find that this does not appear to be true for a large and important class of cases childbirth in the united states using data from national vital statistics natality files on millions of individual births from 1989 to 2001 we ask whether specific tort reforms affect the types of procedures that are performed and the health outcomes of mothers and their infants we find that reform of the joint and several liability rule or the deep pockets rule reduces complications of labor and procedure use whereas caps on noneconomic damages increase them we show that these results are consistent with a model of tort reform that explicitly allows for variations in patient condition

do treatment decisions depend on physicians financial incentives we study whether and how physicians respond to nancial incentives making use of detailed register data on the health care services provided to patients by general practitioners gps in norway over a six year period 2006 11 to identify gps treatment responses we exploit that specialisation in general medicine entitles the gps to a higher consultation fee implying a change in total and relative fee payments to control for demand and supply factors related to becoming a specialist we estimate a gp fixed effect model focusing on a narrow time window around the date of specialist certi cation our results show a sharp response by the gps immediately after obtaining specialist certi fication and thus a higher consultation fee the number of visits increase while the treatment intensity prolonged consultations lab tests medical procedures decline these fi ndings are consistent with a theory model where partly profit motivated gps face excess demand and income effects are sufficiently small finally we find no evidence for adverse health effects measured by emergency care centre visits on patients due to the change in gps treatment behaviour after becoming a specialist

healthy business managerial education and management in healthcare we investigate the link between hospital performance and managerial education by collecting a large database of management practices and skills in hospitals across nine countries we find that hosp

active vs passive decisions and crowd out in retirement savings accounts evidence from denmark using 41 million observations on savings for the population of denmark we show that the effects of retirement savings policies on wealth accumulation depend on whether they change savings rates by active or passive choice subsidies for retirement accounts which rely on individuals to take an action to raise savings primarily induce individuals to shift assets from taxable accounts to retirement accounts we estimate that each 1 of government expenditure on subsidies increases total saving by only 1 cent in contrast policies that raise retirement contributions if individuals take no action such as automatic employer contributions to retirement accounts increase wealth accumulation substantially we estimate that approximately 15 of individuals are active savers who respond to tax subsidies primarily by shifting assets across accounts 85 of individuals are passive savers who are unresponsive to subsidies but are instead heavily influenced by automatic contributions made on their behalf active savers tend to be wealthier and more financially sophisticated we conclude that automatic contributions are more effective at increasing savings rates than subsidies for three reasons i subsidies induce relatively few individuals to respond ii they generate substantial crowd out conditional on response and iii they do not increase the savings of passive individuals who are least prepared for retirement jel codes h2 h3

fragmented division of labor and healthcare costs evidence from moves across regions abstract policies aiming to improve healthcare productivity often focus on reducing care fragmentation care fragmentation occurs when services are spread across many providers potentially making coordination difficult using medicare claims data we analyze the effect of moving to a region with more fragmented care delivery we find that 60 of regional variation in care fragmentation is independent of patients individual demand for care and moving to a region with 1 sd higher fragmentation increases care utilization by 10 when patients move to more fragmented regions they increase their use of specialists and have fewer encounters with primary care physicians more fragmented regions have more intensive care provision on many margins including services sometimes associated with overutilization hospitalizations emergency department visits repeat imaging studies as well as services associated with high value care vaccines guideline concordant for diabetics

productivity and cost gaps in manufacturing industries in u s japan and germany abstract the objective of this paper is to measure and explain the development of differences in productivity for five manufacturing industries of the u s japan and germany changes in total factor productivities and differences in technologies and the sources of those changes will be analyzed we extend the framework developed by jorgenson and nishimizu 1978 to the dual cost approach to reflect the efficiency aspect of productivity gaps in terms of cost disadvantages we employ translog cost functions for a description of productivity and cost efficiency gaps and for an econometric analysis of sources of catching up processes

natural resources and economic growth the role of investment is it possible that excessive reliance on natural resources affects saving and investment in a way that retards economic growth and thus in the long run the level of output per capita this paper reviews the literature explores the data and compares and contrasts the explanatory power and interplay of natural resources and civil liberties our proxy for institutional variables currently under scrutiny in the literature we propose that natural resource dependence may be viewed as an exogenous factor that impedes economic growth and investment as well as institutions even if we stress that natural resource abundance may be good for growth

sources of geographic variation in health care evidence from patient migration we study the drivers of geographic variation in us health care utilization using an empirical strategy that exploits migration of medicare patients to separate the role of demand and supply factors our approach allows us to account for demand differences driven by both observable and unobservable patient characteristics within our sample of over 65 medicare beneficiaries we find that 40 50 percent of geographic variation in utilization is attributable to demand side factors including health and preferences with the remainder due to place specific supply factors jel h51 i1 i11