comparing the welfare effects of public and private health care subsidies in the united kingdom we use a calibrated analytical model to compare the welfare costs gross of externalities of increasing subsidies for public and private health care in the uk the model incorporates wait costs for rationed public care burdens that subsidies impose on the tax system and distributional weights for different households welfare costs are significantly higher for expanding public health care over a range of parameter scenarios both policies reduce average wait times but for public health care this is offset by new waiting costs incurred on extra treatments and the burden on the tax system is much larger for expanding public health care

modelling the dynamics of a public health care system evidence from time series data the english national health service nhs was established in 1948 and has therefore yielded some long time series data on health system performance waiting time for inpatient care have been a persistent policy concern since the creation of the nhs after developing a simple theoretical framework of the dynamic interaction between key indicators of health system performance we investigate empirically the relationship between hospital activity waiting time and population characteristics using aggregate time series data for the nhs over the period 1952 to 2003 structural vector autoregression s var suggests that in the long run higher activity is associated with lower waiting times elasticity 0 9 an increase in the elderly population is associated with higher waiting time elasticity 1 3 in the short run higher lagged waiting time leads to higher activity elasticity 0 12 we also find that shocks in waiting times are countered by higher activity so the effect is only temporary

econometric studies in health economics a survey of the british literature this paper provides a survey of british applied econometric work in the field of health economics as well as reviewing the literature it suggests some avenues for future research it covers six main areas the supply of health care the demand for health care non medical influences on health market and non price rationing evaluation of health care systems and planning budgeting and monitoring mechanisms

the welfare costs of rationing by waiting with price controls and rationing by waiting rational consumers increase the quantity boughtperpurchase this individually rational response is socially wasteful and the cost of making it is a deadweight loss this cost plus the value of time spent in queues may exceed the total rent transferred from suppliers to consumers by price controls i e the value of resources spent competing for the rent may exceed the rent itself this point is illustrated by an empirical application to gasoline price controls rent seeking exhausts an estimated 116 percent of the rent trangerred the efficiency of the price system is often illustrated lby pointing to the obvious wastes associated with alternative allocation mechanisms for example the queues that accompany price controls and first come first served allocations although rationing by waiting wastes resources in a dramatically visible fashion the magnitude of the waste and the factors that determine it seldom have been examined empirically moreover existing theory on the subject is incomplete unless the first come first served rule is precisely specified consumers will compete for available supplies in ways other than waiting in the model developed below queues cause consumers to compete by increasing amounts bought per trip to the market the analysis demonstrates that such individually rational adjustments only increase the welfare cost of rationing by waiting and thus are socially self defeating the theoretical model is illustrated empirically by estimating the welfare costs of a market wide ceiling on gasoline prices this application was motivated by the availability of two key pieces of information the value of time spent in gasoline queues and the effect of waiting lines on amounts bought per purchase this information was obtained from a survey of motorists conducted during the era of federal gasoline price regulations to focus on competition among consumers one of the inefficiencies that results from price controls is ignored the supply reduction leading to the

is ecommerce boundary less effects of individualism collectivism and uncertainty avoidance on internet shopping from publicly available data we identified two national culture dimensions individualism collectivism and uncertainty avoidance and their interaction that influences internet shopping rates across a wide spectrum of countries together these factors accounted for 14 of the explained variance on top of the combined variance of 63 explained by national income level educational level economic growth rate unemployment rate and crime rate in predicting internet shopping rates for countries lower in uncertainty avoidance individualist cultures show higher internet shopping rates than do collectivist cultures implications for national and internet firm level web design strategies are discussed

sovereign debt relief and its aftermath this paper studies sovereign debt relief in a long term perspective we quantify the relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples 1920 1939 focusing on the defaults on official government to government debt in advanced economies after world war i and 1978 2010 focusing on emerging market debt crises with private external creditors debt relief was substantial in both eras averaging 21 of gdp in the 1930s and 16 of gdp in recent decades we then analyze the aftermath of debt relief and conduct a difference in differences analysis around the synchronous war debt defaults of 1934 and the baker and brady initiatives of the 1980s 1990s the economic landscape of debtor countries improves signicantly after debt relief operations but only if these involve debt write offs softer forms of debt relief such as maturity extensions and interest rate reductions are not generally followed by higher economic growth or improved credit ratings jel e6 f3 n0 and h6

a game theoretic model of the relationship between prices and waiting times abstract issue the role of prices charged to patients as a policy instrument for altering waiting times method a game theoretic model is used to examine the determinants of waiting times results under certain circumstances an increase in the price charged to patients at some institutions will lower the waiting times at all institutions conclusions the results provide a set of policy implications and testable predictions that arise under a certain set of assumptions alternative assumptions as well as the policy implications and testable predictions associated with them are also examined

jumping the queue an experiment on procedural preferences abstract we present a three player queuing game to study procedural preferences in a laboratory experiment together with markets queues and waiting lists are universal procedures for allocating goods and services we designed our queuing game to disentangle motivations of outcome oriented egoistic preferences outcome oriented distributional inequality aversion preferences and outcome independent procedural preferences in a series of treatments we introduce a market element and allow two of the three players to bargain over a queue jump thus violating the queuing procedure a third player is able to engage in peer punishment to sanction queue jumping we provide evidence that a simple model of procedural preferences is able to explain the behavior of a share of the subjects in our experiment

households willingness to pay for public housing in the presence of price controls nonmarket housing allocation mechanisms such as queueing prevent households from revealing their marginal willingness to pay for housing through market prices we derive the households marginal willingness to pay using the intuitive idea that the length of the queue for a specific house reflects the households willingness to pay for housing characteristics we apply our methodology to public housing in the amsterdam metropolitan area and show that on average the households marginal willingness to pay for a unit of public housing is close to its marginal costs this suggests that the welfare loss of public housing through distortions in housing supply is rather limited and is mainly through distortions in housing demand we provide indirect evidence of the latter by showing that queueing induces inefficient matching of households and housing

theoretical justification of sampling choices in international marketing research key issues and guidelines for researchers sampling in the international environment needs to satisfy the same requirements as sampling in the domestic environment but there are additional issues to consider such as the need to balance within country representativeness with cross national comparability however most international marketing research studies fail to provide theoretical justification for their choice of sampling approach this is because research design theory and sampling theory have not been well integrated in the context of international research this paper seeks to fill the gap by developing a framework for determining a sampling approach in international studies the framework is based on an assessment of the way in which sampling affects the validity of research results and shows how different research objectives impact upon a the desired sampling method and b the desired sample characteristics the aim is to provide researchers with operational guidance in choosing a sampling approach that is theoretically appropriate to their particular research aims

on the contribution of game theory to the study of sovereign debt and default this paper reviews the lessons learned from the application of the tools of game theory to the theoretical study of sovereign debt and default we focus on two main questions first we review answers to the most fundamental question in the theory of sovereign debt given that there is no supranational institution for enforcing the repayment of debts why do countries ever repay their debts second we review theories of the process by which sovereign debts are restructured with a view to answering the following question why does the process of sovereign debt restructuring appear so inefficient the first question raises issues in the design of self enforcing contracts and on the credibility of threats to punish a country in default the second question involves applications of the theory of bargaining in environments where the parties to a bargain cannot commit to honour the terms of the bargain or even commit to enter into negotiations in the first place copyright 2013 oxford university press

the impact of rent control on rents in the free sector in most cases rent control covers only a part of the housing stock this note provides a simple analysis of the impact which rent control and non price rationing exert on the rent in the free sector it is shown that depending on the rationing mechanism rents in the free sector can be higher or lower than in the absence of rent controls

sovereign default resolution through maturity extension abstract sovereign default episodes are resolved by restructuring the debt through renegotiations and implemented by bond swaps and resumption of debt service payments this process provides debt relief for the sovereign and partially compensates lenders for their losses in the data the bulk of such debt relief is implemented by extending the maturity of the debt rather than changing its face value we augment a standard maturity choice model with a post default renegotiation phase and study whether it can replicate this observed maturity extension the model is successful in generating this and other key features of renegotiations and maturity choice but critically only when we assume that sovereigns continue to be excluded temporarily from financial markets after renegotiation consistent with the observation that countries do not immediately resume borrowing in contrast a version of the model where market access is restored promptly features a counterfactual reduction in maturity a puzzle for the standard model

rationing by waiting lists an empirical investigation abstract many social systems rely on a waiting list rather than price as a rationing device we present a model of the waiting list for elective surgery in the british national health service waiting time is allowed to influence both supply of and demand for surgery the resulting models of supply and demand are estimated empirically using over 4000 observations the results indicate low elasticity of demand with respect to waiting time suggesting that increased resources may reduce waiting times without greatly stimulating utilization the policy implications are important for the british national government when choosing the level of public expenditure to be devoted to health care

the market for elective surgery joint estimation of supply and demand this paper develops models of the demand for and supply of elective non emergency surgery using a panel of quarterly data for 200 english hospitals over the period 1995 2002 unusually distinct measures of supply outpatients seen and inpatient admissions and demand outpatient referrals and decisions to admit are available for each observation these offer the opportunity to estimate separate empirical models of supply and demand using ordinary least squares ols regression methods however the strong correlation between the residuals of these models suggests some merit in the deployment of seemingly unrelated regression sur methods although both static and dynamic sur estimations leave the results largely qualitatively unchanged sur estimation can have a considerable quantitative effect relative to the ols results for example sur estimation generates a lower elasticity of inpatient demand with respect to waiting time than that obtained via ols the results offer an important justification for more careful econometric modelling of hospital behaviour than has traditionally been employed in the health economics literature

modelling parallel markets in centrally planned economies the case of the automobile market in poland most empirical work dealing with socialist economies appears to be oriented towards macroeconomic problems or at least to the study of highly aggregated time series examples are provided by howard 1976 lacko 1975 podkaminer 1982 portes and winter 1980 portes et al 1983 1984a b 1985 welfe 1983 and charemza and gronicki 1988 only relatively infrequently has a particular market been the target of detailed empirical investigation a case in point is the study of the hungarian car market by kapitany kornai and szabo 1984 and chapter 15 of this volume

an econometric analysis of the demand for private health insurance in england and wales this paper discusses the nature of demand for private health insurance in a health care market in which the consumer can neither opt out of tax payments for nor lose his entitlement to public health care a single equation econometric model of the demand for private health cover is estimated using the 1982 general household survey the results indicate that income and employment status are significant determinants of the probability of health insurance purchase

competition and waiting times in hospital markets this paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times we use a salop type model with hospitals that differ in geographical locationand potentially waitingtime andtwotypesofpatients high benefitpatientswhochoosebetweenneighbouring hospitals competitive segment and low benefit patients who decide whether or not to demand treatment from the closest hospital monopoly segment compared with a benchmark case of monopoly we find that hospital competition leads to longer waiting times in equilibrium if the competitive segment is sufficiently large given a policy regime of hospital competition the effect of increased competition depends on the parameter of measurement lower travelling costs increase waiting times higher hospital density reduces waiting times while the effect of a larger competitive segment is ambiguous we also show that if the competitive segment is large hospital competition is socially preferable to monopoly only if the regulated treatment price is sufficiently high 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

elasticity estimates from a dynamic model of interrelated demands for private and public acute health care this paper investigates the private public mix in acute health care provision in the uk it uses an interrelated shares model derived from a translog function combined with dynamic adjustment using prices for public care constructed from nhs waiting lists the insurance cost of private care and the retain price index impact intermediate and long run elasticities of demand for private and public care are obtained the role of hospital consultants and of an aging population are also considered

examining the cross national applicability of multi item multi dimensional measures using generalizability theory establishing the applicability of multi item measures is important for making valid inferences when testing theories cross nationally typically researchers have relied upon the tenets of classical measurement theory ct using confirmatory factor model invariance testing to conclude that a unidimensional measure is applicable across countries however two important issues remain unresolved via ct techniques 1 if the measure is found not to be invariant ct tells us little as to why the measure varies across countries and 2 if the measure is multi dimensional what factors affect its cross national applicability our research seeks to address these issues and the cross national measurement applicability of multi dimensional scales via generalizability theory gt in this paper we use a cross national data set and simulated data sets to demonstrate the usefulness of gt to cross national multi dimensional measurement

the welfare costs of price controls for cars and color televisions in poland contrasting estimates of rent seeking from recent experience the welfare costs of price controls can vary enormously depending on the method of allocating the goods in shortage and the possible rent seeking costs that may result with full rent dissipation the welfare loss from price controls on polish color televisions in 1989 was about ten times the standard estimates of distortion costs which ignore rent seeking and was more than 100 percent of the value of domestic producers sales the methods of allocating cars however did not result in rent seeking costs the domestic price controls were an unintended implicit subsidy to imports subsidies for cars were estimated at 43 percent and for color televisions at 22 percent

cross national differences in computer use ethics a nine country study this study examines computer use ethics among nine countries singapore hong kong united states great britain australia sweden wales and the netherlands based on paradice 1990 an instrument was developed containing three scales focusing on ethical attitudes toward software license infringement use of virus programs and misuse of corporate computing resources analysis indicates that there are significant differences in ethical values among nationalities for each of these scales

contingent valuation of time spent on nhs waiting lists this paper derives estimates of the consumer bourne costs of waiting lists for nonurgent medical care the methodology used is contingent valuation the paper examines the use of this methodology and presents the experimental context and the estimates derived the estimates indicate the average valuation of a month spent on a waiting list for nonurgent care is approximately 40 pounds but also show that there exist significant interpersonal differences in valuations copyright 1990 by royal economic society

dynamic hospital competition under rationing by waiting times abstract we develop a dynamic model of hospital competition where i waiting times increase if demand exceeds supply ii patients choose a hospital based in part on waiting times and iii hospitals incur waiting time penalties we show that whereas policies based on penalties will lead to lower waiting times policies that promote patient choice will instead lead to higher waiting times these results are robust to different game theoretic solution concepts designs of the hospital penalty structure and patient utility specifications furthermore waiting time penalties are likely to be more effective in reducing waiting times if they are designed with a linear penalty structure but the counterproductive effect of patient choice policies is smaller when penalties are convex these conclusions are partly derived by calibration of our model based on waiting times and elasticities observed in the english nhs for a common treatment cataract surgery

computational controversies in disequilibrium and shortage modelling of centrally planned economies abstract most disequilibrium and shortage models of centrally planned economies fall into three categories testable excess demand the portes school disequilibrium indicators and kornai s economics of shortage these models have generated numerous controversies and conflicting empirical results however this paper argues that some disputes are not caused by the theoretical features of the models but rather by the utilisation of different estimation methods that are not directly comparable this suggests that several controversies are more apparent than real and can be resolved through the improvement of computational techniques and statistical hypothesis testing theory

haircuts estimating investor losses in sovereign debt restructurings 1998 2005 abstract we calculate investor losses haircuts and recovery values in recent debt restructurings in russia ukraine pakistan ecuador argentina and uruguay haircuts are computed as the percentage difference between the present values of old and new instruments discounted at the yield prevailing immediately after the exchange recovery value means value received in terms of outstanding principal we find average npv haircuts ranging from 13 uruguay external exchange to 73 2005 argentina exchange recovery values range from 30 to about 75 we also find within exchange variations in haircuts and recovery values depending on the bond tendered with a few exceptions domestic residents do not appear to have been treated systematically better or worse than foreign residents

the impact of patient choice and waiting time on the demand for health care results from the london patient choice project in a number of countries where health care is publicly funded policies to introduce greater patient choice are being implemented in most cases patient choice is seen as an instrument to reduce waiting times for elective non emergency hospital services an important issue is whether facilitating greater patient choice will increase the demand for health care and thereby undermine the achievement of reduced waiting times a large scale pilot of choice in the london metropolitan area permits a test of the hypothesis that choice will affect demand this paper estimates a model of the demand for elective surgery using a panel of 150 english acute hospitals over the period 1995 to 2004 for three surgical specialties it examines whether demand shifted following the introduction of the london patient choice project in 2002 the results suggest that the choice project only shifted nhs inpatient demand in orthopaedics and that this shift was inwards

a dynamic model of supply of elective surgery in the presence of waiting times and waiting lists this paper analyses hospitals decisions regarding the supply of elective surgery in a dynamic model in the presence of waiting times and waiting lists we show that periods of increasing decreasing supply and increasing decreasing waiting list may be optimal paths towards the steady state we also analyse the hospitals response to exogenous shocks on the demand and the supply for example an increase in the marginal tariff for the provider generates overshooting in the supply supply jumps upwards when the shock is introduced and then slowly reduces towards the steady state value

price controls and rent seeking behavior in developing countries abstract when the price of a good is controlled a nonprice allocation rule must necessarily be substituted for allocation by price examples are first come first served allocation which gives rise to rationing by waiting and allocation by an explicit system of ration coupons with rationing by waiting consumers are induced to pursue activities that economize on waiting costs such as buying a larger quantity per purchase although such responses are individually rational they are socially self defeating in the sense that they lower equilibrium consumer welfare rationing by coupons can avoid some but typically not all of these losses these ideas are developed with examples of model economies and their practical relevance is illustrated with evidence from developing countries

creditors losses versus debt relief results from a decade of sovereign debt crises this paper computes debt relief and investor losses associated with the major emerging market defaults and debt restructurings of the 1998 2005 period investor losses ranged from 13 to 75 based on comparing the market value of the new debt with the net present value of the old debt evaluated at the sovereign yield immediately following the debt exchange however the net present value of debt relief from a country perspective calculated using estimated country borrowing rates in normal times was typically lower in many cases countries could have lowered their remaining debt burdens for given investor losses by making their debt restructuring offers more front loaded the fact that they did not do so suggests that debtor countries did not expect to enjoy stable access to international credit markets even outside the typical exclusion period following a default jel f34

systemic and idiosyncratic sovereign debt crises the theoretical literature on sovereign defaults has focused on adverse shocks to debtors economies suggesting that defaults are of an idiosyncratic nature still sovereign debt crises are also of a systemic nature clustered around panics in the financial center such as the european sovereign debt crisis in the aftermath of the u s subprime crisis in 2008 crises in the financial centers are rare disasters and thus their effects on the periphery can only be captured by examining long episodes this paper examines sovereign defaults from 1820 to the great depression with a focus on latin america we find that 63 of the crises are of a systemic nature these crises are different both the international collapse of liquidity and the growth slowdown in the financial centers are at their core these global shocks trigger longer default spells and larger investors losses

ramsey waits allocating public health service resources when there is rationing by waiting the optimal allocation of a public health care budget across treatments must take account of the way in which care is rationed within treatments since this will affect their marginal value we investigate the optimal allocation rules for public health care systems where user charges are fixed and care is rationed by waiting the optimal waiting time is higher for treatments with demands more elastic to waiting time higher costs lower charges smaller marginal welfare loss from waiting by treated patients and smaller marginal welfare losses from under consumption of care the results hold for a wide range of welfarist and non welfarist objective functions and for systems in which there is also a private health care sector they imply that allocation rules based purely on cost effectiveness ratios are suboptimal because they assume that there is no rationing within treatments