the design of insurance coverage for medical products under imperfect competition this paper studies the design of health insurance with ex post moral hazard when there is imperfect competition in the market for the medical product various scenarios such as monopoly pricing or horizontal differentiation are considered insurers or their regulator can commit to a reimbursement policy which specifies two types of copayments an ad valoremcoinsurance rate and a specific per unit copayment by combining both copayment rates in an adequate way the insurer can effectively control the producer price which is then set so that the producer s revenue just covers fixed costs consequently a suitable regulation of the copayment instruments leads to the same reimbursement rule as under perfect competition for medical products additional rationing of coverage because of imperfect competition is notnecessary the optimal policy involves the smallest possible copayment combined with the largest possible coinsurance rate such that the participation constraint of health providers is binding

has india s economic growth become more pro poor in the wake of economic reforms the extent to which india s poor have benefited from the country s economic growth has long been debated a new series of consumption based poverty measures spanning 50 years including a 15 year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s is used to examine that issue growth has tended to reduce poverty including in the post reform period there is no robust evidence of more or less poverty responsiveness to growth since the reforms began although there are signs of rising inequality the impact of growth is higher when using poverty measures that reflects distribution below the poverty line and when using growth rates calculated from household surveys rather than national accounts the urban rural pattern of growth matters for the pace of poverty reduction however in marked contrast to the period before the reforms urban economic growth in the period after the reforms has brought significant gains to the rural poor as well as the urban poor

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

when prices hardly matter incomplete insurance contracts and markets for repair goods abstract this paper looks at markets characterized by the fact that the demand side is insured in these markets a consumer purchases a good to compensate consequences of unfavorable events such as an accident or an illness insurance policies in most lines of insurance base indemnity on the insured s actual expenses i e the insured would be partially or completely reimbursed when purchasing certain goods in this setting we discuss the interaction between insurance and repair markets by focusing on one hand upon the development of prices and the structure of markets with insured consumers and on the other hand the resulting backlash on optimal insurance contracting we show that even in the absence of ex post moral hazard the extension of insurance coverage will lead to an increase in prices as well as to a socially undesirable increase in the number of repair service suppliers if repair markets are imperfect

entrepreneurship selection and performance a meta analysis of the impact of education in developing economies this meta analytical review of empirical studies of the impact of schooling on entrepreneurship in selection and performance in developing economies looks at variations impact across specific characteristics of the studies a marginal year of schooling in developing economies raises enterprise income by an average of 5 5 percent which is close to the average return in industrial countries the return varies however by gender rural or urban residence and the share of agriculture in the economy furthermore more educated workers typically end up in wage employment and prefer nonfarm entrepreneurship to farming the education effect that separates workers into self employment and wage employment is stronger for women possibly stronger in urban areas and also stronger in the least developed economies where agriculture is more dominant and literacy rates are lower

counterfactual decomposition of changes in wage distributions using quantile regression we propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in several factors contributing to those changes the method is based on the estimation of marginal wage distributions consistent with a conditional distribution estimated by quantile regression as well as with any hypothesized distribution for the covariates comparing the marginal distributions implied by different distributions for the covariates one is then able to perform counterfactual exercises the proposed methodology enables the identification of the sources of the increased wage inequality observed in most countries specifically it decomposes the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time into several factors contributing to those changes namely by discriminating between changes in the characteristics of the working population and changes in the returns to these characteristics we apply this methodology to portuguese data for the period 1986 1995 and find that the observed increase in educational levels contributed decisively towards greater wage inequality copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

coalition formation in transmission expansion planning the study of a decentralized coalition formation scheme in a specific power systems transmission expansion scenario is the purpose of this paper the authors define first who are the agents in the expansion game and provide a decentralized coalition scheme based on bilateral shapley values finally they allocate the total costs of expansion amongst the agents based on the coalition history and they compare their method with a centralized scheme

a three level static milp model for generation and transmission expansion planning we present a three level equilibrium model for the expansion of an electric network the lower level model represents the equilibrium of a pool based market the intermediate level represents the nash equilibrium in generation capacity expansion taking into account the outcomes on the spot market and the upper level model represents the anticipation of transmission expansion planning to the investment in generation capacity and the pool based market equilibrium the demand has been considered as exogenous and locational marginal prices are obtained as endogenous variables of the model the three level model is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming milp problem the model is applied to a realistic power system in chile to illustrate the methodology and proper conclusions are reached

the wealth effects of premium subsidies on moral hazard in insurance markets abstract insurance premium subsidies are present in many insurance markets the swiss government for example paid out chf 4 26 billion or 0 72 of the swiss gdp for health insurance premium subsidies in 2011 analyses of premium subsidies have often highlighted that the increased insurance demand due to premium subsidies increases the effects of moral hazard in the market other consequences of premium subsidies however have mostly been neglected by the literature we show in our theoretical model that the wealth effects of premium subsidies decrease the sensitivity of the insured towards the monetary consequences of losses this leads to less prevention efforts by the insured and thus increases moral hazard in the market the effect is preserved if the subsidy is financed through proportional taxation using two alternative models we show that providing state dependent subsidies can either increase or reverse this effect depending on which state subsidies are paid we argue that whether demand effects or wealth effects of premium subsidies will dominate the insured s behavior depends on the market structure

structural and behavioural characteristics of informal service employment evidence from a survey in new delhi this article argues that at least two distinct categories within the informal sector informal services and informal manufacturing exhibit different structural and behavioural characteristics while some segments of informal manufacturing may indeed be dynamic as noted by some recent studies the hypothesis is tested for the informal service employment on the basis of a survey by the author in new delhi india it examines investment earnings returns to human capital socio economic characteristics and scope for upward mobility of informal service employment it finds formal education does not explain differences in earnings in the sample but background characteristics do earnings in the informal service sector are neither the lowest in the economy nor are they comparable to wages in the urban formal unskilled sector when differences between migrants and non migrants are taken into account on the basis of these results the paper reflects on the nature of growth and structural change in the indi

transmission expansion planning in electricity markets this paper presents a mixed integer linear programming lp formulation for the long term transmission expansion planning problem in a competitive pool based electricity market to achieve optimal expansion planning while modeling market functioning we define a number of scenarios based on the future demand in the system and we simulate the maximization of the aggregate social welfare investment and operating costs transmission losses and generator offers and demand bids are considered we propose to use a set of metrics to rate the effect of the expansion on the generators demands and the system as a whole the proposed model is applied to the garver six bus system and to the ieee 24 bus reliability test system simulation results can be interpreted in economic terms based on the values of the metrics obtained for different scenarios parameters and topologies

the impact of hospital market structure on patient volume average length of stay and the cost of care a variety of recent proposals rely heavily on market forces as a means of controlling hospital cost inflation sceptics argue however that increased competition might lead to cost increasing acquisitions of specialized clinical services and other forms of non price competition as means of attracting physicians and patients using data from hospitals in 1972 we analyzed the impact of market structure on average hospital costs measured in terms of both cost per patient and cost per patient day under the retrospective reimbursement system in place at the time hospitals in more competitive environments exhibited significantly higher costs of production than did those in less competitive environments

toward fully renewable electric energy systems renewable energy sources are here to stay for a number of important reasons including global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels we explore in this paper how a thermal dominated electric energy system can be transformed into a renewable dominated one this study relies on a stochastic programming model that allows representing the uncertain parameters plaguing such long term planning exercise being the final year of our analysis 2050 we represent the transition from today to 2050 by allowing investment in both production and transmission facilities with the target of achieving a renewable dominated minimum cost system the methodology developed is illustrated using a realistic large scale case study finally policy conclusions are drawn

can cross border transmission expansion lead to fair and stable cooperation northeast asia case analysis abstract in this paper we present a framework for analyzing cross border power interconnection projects based on cooperative game theory compared to existing studies we not only quantify the benefits of interconnections and suggest cost benefit allocation techniques but also analyze the stability of the allocations which is a crucial aspect in regions where coordination and mutual trust between countries have not been built yet we apply our framework to the northeast asia where six countries china russia mongolia south korea north korea and japan are suggested for cross border transmission expansion planning cooperation cost benefits allocation of the interconnections is analyzed according to the marginal contribution of each country to the grand coalition and the minimal dissatisfaction of each coalition that ensures the stability of the solution accordingly game theory concepts the shapley value and the nucleolus are used in our analysis moreover we employ the core concept to further analyze the stability of the allocation solution and present a visualization of the feasible space formed by all stable allocations we found out that the grand coalition i e the scenario where all countries agree on the cooperation is the optimal and stable coalition with 7 1 billion total savings per year we also suggested a scheme of investment allocation and payments between the northeast asian countries in order to ensure that the proposed interconnections are plausible in practice

nonprofit hospital mergers and the exercise of market power government challenges to mergers within the hospital industry have become more frequent many of those mergers involve nonprofit organizations rather than the for profit firms that are the norm in most other industries this difference in ownership has made no apparent difference in the antitrust agencies approach to proposed hospital mergers in this article i test the proposition that nonprofit and for profit hospitals price differently in response to the structure of the markets in which they compete based on a cross sectional analysis of california hospitals i find that estimated merger effects on hospital prices do vary by type of ownership in response to either higher market share or to the joint combination of higher share and higher market concentration private nonprofit hospital prices are statistically significantly lower than for profit hospital prices and on balance in this sample there is no evidence of any systematic price increasing effect on private nonprofit hospitals

nash equilibrium in strategic bidding a binary expansion approach this paper presents a mixed integer linear programming solution approach for the equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec problem of finding the nash equilibrium ne in strategic bidding in short term electricity markets a binary expansion be scheme is used to transform the nonlinear nonconvex ne problem into a mixed integer linear problem milp which can be solved by commercially available computational systems the be scheme can be applicable to cournot bertrand or joint price quantity bidding models the approach is illustrated in case studies with configurations derived from the 95 gw brazilian system including unit commitment decisions to the price maker agents

a bilevel approach to transmission expansion planning within a market environment we present a bilevel model for transmission expansion planning within a market environment where producers and consumers trade freely electric energy through a pool the target of the transmission planner modeled through the upper level problem is to minimize network investment cost while facilitating energy trading this upper level problem is constrained by a collection of lower level market clearing problems representing pool trading and whose individual objective functions correspond to social welfare using the duality theory the proposed bilevel model is recast as a mixed integer linear programming problem which is solvable using branch and cut solvers detailed results from an illustrative example and a case study are presented and discussed finally some relevant conclusions are drawn

are invisible hands good hands moral hazard competition and the second best in health care markets the nature and normative properties of competition in health care markets have long been the subject of much debate in this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance intuitively it seems that imperfect competition in the health care market may constrain this moral hazard by increasing prices we show that this intuition cannot be correct if insurance markets are competitive a competitive insurance market will always produce a contract that leaves consumers at least as well off under lower prices as under higher prices

impact of network payment schemes on transmission expansion planning with variable renewable generation abstract a large number of studies have dealt with the transmission expansion planning tep problem however few investigations have focused on analyzing the impacts of network payment schemes on network configuration and the benefits losses distribution among the participants in electricity markets in this paper we propose a multi annual transmission expansion planning model considering four different network payment schemes to finance the construction of new transmission lines seeking to reduce the total system costs wind and solar power generation are included in the model taking into account their variability the proposed models are reformulated as mixed integer linear programming milp problems we use seven performance metrics related with congestion nodal prices and generator benefits among others to evaluate the effect of each payment scheme a realistic case study based on the main power system in chile is analyzed to illustrate the proposed models it is shown that integrating line cost recovering equations into the tep model may result into a more realistic and less congested power network also total system cost is highly related with transmission tariff discrimination in that way tariffs with high location dependence perform better in the case studied the chilean power system

individual welfare when consumers can shop for health insurance i introduction the affordable care act aca of 2010 allows millions of americans to buy health insurance policies on competitive insurance exchanges as application denial is illegal consumers will be able to change health insurance policies when there are changes in the economic environment or health status the phenomenon of endogenous consumer contract choice is poised to play an important role in the study of health insurance demand and medical care utilization among the broad population not just for the elderly who can choose among alternative medicare plans this article illustrates the importance of endogenous consumer health insurance contract choice by analyzing the individual welfare effect of a reduction in the price of medical care a potential consequence of the aca we show that the insurance contract choice response is critical to determining the outcome ii prior literature the analysis of the individual moral hazard welfare effect of a medical care price decline was a topic of discussion in the literature during the last three decades of the previous century while there was disagreement on the perspective to take a conventional wisdom emerged as health insurance discounts the price of medical care the consumer faces a lower i e net price this causes moral hazard induced excess consumption and welfare loss for a given coinsurance rate a price decline further lowers the net price increases excess demand and exacerbates the welfare loss the conventional wisdom was challenged by gaynor haas wilson and vogt 2000 they focused on the competitive insurance company and allowed it to increase the coinsurance rate so as to offset the medical care price decline which leaves the net price demand and moral hazard induced welfare loss unchanged in the situation when the consumer decides to become uninsured they show that individual welfare loss can be reduced these form the basis for their proposition 1 the rest of their paper deals with societal welfare the current article relates to this proposition 1 the issue of individual moral hazard welfare loss as distinct from the issue of societal welfare the modeling approach has much in common with gaynor haas wilson and vogt 2000 our model is the dual we therefore shift the focus from the insurer to the consumer who explicitly exercises endogenous insurance contract choice we eschew their assumption of a unit elastic insurance demand and allow for other possible insurance demand responses not just the unit elastic one we show that if insurance demand is medical care price elastic then it is indeed possible to have a reduction in moral hazard welfare loss in our treatment however this outcome does not require the consumer to become uninsured furthermore and most important we show that the opposite can easily be true if insurance demand is inelastic i e the insured retains some portion of the reduction in out of pocket expense risk then moral hazard welfare loss increases after the price reduction although the increase is less than would occur in the absence of the contract choice effect our results build on our previous work in dusansky and k05 2006 we studied the role of health insurance choice in medical care demand taking a partial equilibrium approach the response of a competitive insurance industry was precluded in dusansky and koc 2010 we explored the interaction between the endogenous demands for health insurance and medical care demand using a more general principal agent model in which the competitive insurer s response to a medical care price change is explicitly allowed to alter the consumer s insurance choice set the current article extends that analysis to examine the effect of a medical care price change on individual consumer moral hazard welfare loss iii the model we employ a principal agent model in which the consumer faces health status uncertainty and is able to exercise endogenous insurance policy choice

consumer s surplus without apology the purpose of this paper is to settle the controversy surrounding consumer s surplus and by so doing to validate its use as a tool of welfare economics i will show that observed consumer s surplus can be rigorously utilized to estimate the unobservable compensating and equivalent variations the correct theoretical measures of the welfare impact of changes in prices and income on an individual i derive precise upper and lower bounds on the percentage errors of approximating the compensating and equivalent variations with consumer s surplus these bounds can be explicitly calculated from observable demand data and it is clear that in most applications the error of approximation will be very small in fact the error will often be overshadowed by the errors involved in estimating the demand curve the results in no way depend upon arguments about the constancy of the marginal utility of income consequently this paper supplies specific empirical criteria which can replace the apologetic caveats frequently employed by those who presently apply consumer s surplus moreover the results imply that consumer s surplus is usually a very good approximation to the appropriate welfare measures to preview below i establish the validity of these rules of thumb for a

transmission expansion in an oligopoly considering generation investment equilibrium abstract transmission expansion planning tep is a sophisticated decision making problem especially in an oligopolistic electricity market in which a number of strategic price maker producers compete together a transmission system planner who is in charge of making tep decisions requires considering the future generation investment actions however in such an oligopolistic market each producer makes its own strategic generation investment decisions this motivates the transmission system planner to consider the generation investment decision making problem of all producers within its tep model the strategic generation investment problem of each producer can be represented by a complementarity bi level model the joint consideration of all bi level models one per producer characterizes the generation investment equilibrium that identifies the future evolution of generation investment in the market this paper proposes a tri level tep decision making model to be solved by the transmission system planner whose objective is to maximize the social welfare of the market minus the expansion costs and whose constraints are the transmission expansion limits as well as the generation investment equilibrium problem this model is then recast as a mixed integer linear programming problem and solved numerical results from an illustrative example and a case study based on the ieee 14 bus test system demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach

robust transmission planning under uncertain generation investment and retirement transmission planning is typically faced with a wide range of uncertainty including growth in demand renewable energy generation and fuel price the restructuring of the electric power industry the drive for energy independence and the push for a cleaner environment have led to additional sources of uncertainty in all aspects of power system operations and planning the more decentralized decision making implicates uncertainty in future generation investment and retirement of existing units such uncertainties are among the biggest challenges in transmission planning in power systems however existing approaches in the literature do not fully address this problem in this paper we construct a new robust transmission planning model representing generation investment and retirement uncertainty more realistically to improve the quantification and visualization of uncertainty and the impacts of environmental policies with this model we can manage the impacts of uncertainty in the time the size and the location of candidate generation additions as well as the retirement of units the corresponding algorithm we develop takes advantage of the structural characteristics of the model so as to obtain a computationally efficient solution methodology we present an extensive numerical study on the wecc 240 bus system and illustrate the effectiveness of our approach

review of grid tie micro generation systems without energy storage towards a new approach to sustainable hybrid energy systems linked to energy efficiency abstract this paper reviews the literature on the subject albeit approaching hybrid micro generation power systems from a systems thinking st and cybernetics standpoint viewing them as dynamically complex adaptive systems cas coupled with and supplying to a set of homes termed a sustainable block in a rural setting here homeostatic regulation hr and control play a vital role in reaching efficient equilibrium towards reconciling power supply and demand response management unlike most of the work reviewed in the literature the focus here is on supervisory control of grid connected micro generation systems without energy storage aiming towards building energy efficiency thriftiness and sustainability in energy consumption building on homeostatic control hc principles first introduced by f c schweppe in 1979 the paper explores the concepts of sustainability and sustainable hybrid energy systems shes applied to micro generation focusing on operational aspects rather than on socio economic environmental or regulatory ones a concrete theoretical model for building a shes is presented for a proposed grid connected renewable microgrid the model seeks to reconcile power supply and demand towards efficient equilibrium homeostasis proposing reward based criteria for controlling renewable electricity supply and consumption in rural communities in chile discussion and recommendations are also offered stating that energy sustainability es is essentially a systems issue and one where es is first and foremost a structural organizational and operational property which is in the very nature of the system itself it is built into it rather than explained by exogenous factors

health insurance as a two part pricing contract monopolies appear throughout health care we show that health insurance operates like a conventional two part pricing contract that allows monopolists to extract profits without inefficiently constraining quantity when insurers are free to offer a range of insurance contracts to different consumer types health insurance markets perfectly eliminate deadweight losses from upstream health care monopolies frictions limiting the sorting of different consumer types into different insurance contracts restore some of these upstream monopoly losses which manifest as higher rates of uninsurance rather than as restrictions in quantity utilized by insured consumers empirical analysis of pharmaceutical patent expiration supports the prediction that heavily insured markets experience little or no efficiency loss under monopoly while less insured markets exhibit behavior more consistent with the standard theory of monopoly

strategic bidding under uncertainty a binary expansion approach this work presents a binary expansion be solution approach to the problem of strategic bidding under uncertainty in short term electricity markets the be scheme is used to transform the products of variables in the nonlinear bidding problem into a mixed integer linear programming formulation which can be solved by commercially available computational systems the be scheme is applicable to pure price pure quantity or joint price quantity bidding models it is also possible to represent transmission networks uncertainties scenarios for price quantity plant availability and load financial instruments capacity reinforcement decisions and unit commitment the application of the methodology is illustrated in case studies with configurations derived from the 80 gw brazilian system

finding multiple nash equilibria in pool based markets a stochastic epec approach we present a compact formulation to find all pure nash equilibria in a pool based electricity market with stochastic demands the equilibrium model is formulated as a stochastic equilibrium problem subject to equilibrium constraints epec the problem is based on a stackelberg game where the generating companies gencos optimize their strategic bids anticipating the solution of the independent system operator iso market clearing a finite strategy approach both in prices and quantities is applied to transform the nonlinear and nonconvex set of nash inequalities into a mixed integer linear problem milp a procedure to find all nash equilibria is developed by generating holes that are added as linear constraints to the feasibility region the result of the problem is the set of all pure nash equilibria and the market clearing prices and assigned energies by the iso a case study illustrates the methodology and proper conclusions are reached

economic criteria for planning transmission investment in restructured electricity markets from an economic perspective a common criterion for assessing the merits of a transmission investment is its impacts on social welfare the underlying assumption in using this criterion is that side payments may be used to distribute the social gains among all market players in reality however since the impacts of an electricity transmission project on different players may vary such side payments are rather difficult to implement this paper focuses on different economic criteria that should be considered when planning electricity transmission investments we propose an electricity transmission investment assessment methodology that is capable of evaluating the economic impacts on the various effected stakeholders and account for strategic responses that could enhance or impede the investment s objectives we formulate transmission planning as an optimization problem under alternative conflicting objectives and investigate the policy implications of divergent expansion plans resulting from the planner s level of anticipation of strategic responses we find that optimal transmission expansion plans may be very sensitive to supply and demand parameters we also show that the transmission investments have significant distributional impact creating acute conflicts of interests among market participants we use a 32 bus representation of the main chilean grid to illustrate our results

a transmission planning framework considering future generation expansions in electricity markets this paper proposes a transmission planning framework in a market environment in which only the generation sector is deregulated the proposed framework is based on modeling generation companies gencos strategic behavior and anticipating their expansion patterns from the viewpoint of a transmission system planner the transmission expansion planning problem in this paper is modeled as a four level optimization problem a solution method based on agent based systems and search based optimization techniques is proposed to determine the optimal transmission expansion plan

education and household inequality change a decomposition analysis for india previous studies show that rising returns to education have lead to higher wage inequality in developing countries however given the importance of non wage employment and indirect effects of education through labour supply and fertility choices a similar relationship does not necessarily hold for inequality between households based on a decomposition analysis for india we find counteracting impacts of education on household expenditure inequality declining returns to education of household heads reduced inequality driven by the self employed in contrast rising returns to spouses education increased inequality in urban areas we also find that changes in education levels increased rural and urban inequality due to persistently high illiteracy finally the indirect effect on fertility had a small equalizing impact in urban areas but slightly increased inequality in rural areas