why do different countries choose a different public private mix of educational services we observe a wide range across countries in the percentage of total enrollments that attend private rather than public schools this paper seeks to explain 1 the systematically higher proportion of private enrollments pvt in developing as compared with developed countries at the secondary level and 2 the seemingly random variation across countries within a given level of education and stage of development i argue that the latter is due to differentiated demand and nonprofit supply both of which stem from cultural heterogeneity especially religious heterogeneity in contrast the large pvt at the secondary level in developing countries is hypothesized to stem from limited public spending which creates an excess demand from people who would prefer to use the public schools but are involuntarily excluded and pushed into the private sector the limited public spending on secondary education in turn is modelled as a collective decision which is strongly influenced by the

modeling charitable giving using a box cox standard tobit model there is a large literature investigating the determinants of charitable giving in particular price and income elasticities we find that many of the most often reported results from this literature rely on a model specification that is inappropriate when applied to recent federal tax file data we develop a standard tobit model with a box cox transformation parameter that nests a number of other specifications the box cox model yields estimates of price elasticities and expected charitable contributions that differ from those obtained using the typical specification additionally we find that the use of sample weights provides potentially important policy insights copyright 1991 by mit press

the supply of charity services by nonprofit hospitals motives and market structure this article studies provision of charity care by private nonprofit hospitals we demonstrate that in the absence of large positive income effects on charity care supply convex preferences for the nonprofit hospital imply crowding out by other private or government hospitals extending our model to include impure altruism rivalry provides a possible explanation for the previously reported empirical result that both crowding out and income effects on indigent care supply are often weak or insignificant empirical analysis of data for hospitals in maryland provides evidence of rivalry on the supply of charity care

hospital ownership and performance this study compares the performance of three ownership forms of hospitals for profit private nonprofit and public further classified according to whether or not the hospital is run by a hospital chain data come from a 1979 national survey of u s hospitals the authors find that hospital cost is quite similar among alternative ownership forms as is profitability the results do not provide much empirical support for standard property rights theory several reasons are suggested why this may be so

how is demand for natural gas determined across european industrial sectors abstract this paper estimates the response of manufacturing sectors natural gas demand to price and output changes the average response to future changes in absolute and relative prices of the manufacturing industry in an oecd country depends on the mix of manufacturing industries particularly with respect to energy intensity and substitution opportunities in production we estimate short and long run demand elasticities using a shrinkage estimator which allows heterogeneous demand responses across industries for each country our results show that price and output elasticities are heterogeneous within the same manufacturing sector across countries furthermore an output contraction due to e g demand shocks will generally have larger negative effects on gas demand than increases in natural gas prices

management ownership and market valuation an empirical analysis we investigate the relationship between management ownership and market valuation of the firm as measured by tobin s q in a 1980 cross section of 371 fortune 500 firms we find evidence of a significant nonmonotonic relationship tobin s q first increases then declines and finally rises slightly as ownership by the board of directors rises for older firms there is evidence that q is lower when the firm is run by a member of the founding family than when it is run by an officer unrelated to the founder

consumer information and competition between nonprofit and for profit nursing homes this paper develops implications of arrow s hypothesis that nonprofit organizations are prevalent in health care because of quality uncertainty the model analyzes the ability of nonprofits to mitigate market failures created by asymmetric information in an environment characterized by potential competition from both explicitly for profit firms and for profits in disguise profit motivated firms who obtain nonprofit status in order to exploit the perceived trustworthiness of the nonprofit sector under certain conditions it is shown that nonprofit status can serve as a credible signal of quality and that nonprofits can decrease the underprovision of quality both by providing high quality services and indirectly via a spillover effect on quality in the for profit sector applicability to long term care and implications for empirical research and policy towards nonprofits in health care are discussed

demand for collective goods in private nonprofit markets can fundraising expenditures help overcome free rider behavior abstract economic theory ascribes the primary role in the provision of public goods to government this emphasis on government overlooks the role of the not for profit sector in providing collective type goods in this paper we seek to determine the factors influencing charitable contributions to private nonprofit organizations by estimating a demand function for the output of these collective good providers specifically we test the hypothesis that voluntary giving is responsive to conventional market variables such as advertising expenditures price and quality overall the results are strongly supportive

interfuel competition in france and west germany abstract this article presents a simple and practical methodology to analyse the annual evolution of an energy market the point of departure is to evaluate the effects of interfuel substitution economic growth and energy efficiency on demand for each fuel the model should permit us to evaluate the annual changes in energy mix probably one of the concepts that casts most light is the one here called available market for competition that gives an adjusted picture of interfuel substitution the model has been used to study the household and industrial energy markets of france and west germany

a step back as donors shift institution building from the public to the private sector abstract frustrated with public sectors in developing countries donors have shifted support to nonprofit nongovernmental organizations this paper questions the preferability of the nonprofit or public sector from the donor and host country perspectives case study experience from agriculture and natural resource institutions in ecuador and the dominican republic is presented to expand upon current thinking about the role of the nonprofit sector nonprofits are found to possess substantially increased flexibility for donor purposes and avoid many of the pitfalls of the political process they are however subject to free rider problems and bear no responsibility to the general public

board composition and nonprofit conduct evidence from hospitals abstract this study uses data from hospitals to test the hypothesis that management representation on nonprofit boards leads to excessive ceo pay defined as compensation that exceeds the level predicted by a market wage model we document a relatively small but statistically significant positive association between ceo pay and insider boards that include the ceo and other employees as members additional tests confirm that this result is not driven by endogenous board structure and that excess pay is greater in the absence of competition from for profit hospitals we then examine whether management board representation is associated with larger underlying agency concerns that lead to reduced donations our tests do not support this hypothesis but do however reveal a negative correlation between donations and physician representation on the board suggesting a potential conflict between the interests of donors and non employee physicians our overall evidence provides empirical support for modeling nonprofit organizations as consisting of competing stakeholders

quality competition with profit constraints abstract firms in markets such as health care and education are often profit constrained due to regulation or their non profit status and they are often viewed as being altruistic towards consumers we use a spatial competition framework to study incentives for cost containment and quality provision by altruistic firms facing profit constraints if prices are regulated profit constraints lead to lower cost containment efforts but higher quality if and only if firms are sufficiently altruistic under price competition profit constraints reduce quality and cost containment efforts but lead to lower prices if and only if firms are sufficiently altruistic profit constrained firms cost containment efforts are below the first best while their quality might be too high or too low if prices are regulated profit constraints can improve welfare and be a complement or substitute to a higher regulated price depending on the degree of altruism

interfuel competition in the industrial sector of seven oecd countries abstract the purpose of this article is to present an analysis of interfuel substitution in the industrial sector of seven major oecd countries the united states canada japan germany france the united kingdom and italy over the 1960 1993 period translog models are used to provide estimates of price elasticities from annual data for each country results outline the weakness of price elasticities and changes in behaviour over the last 35 years and show evidence of asymmetric effects since the collapse of oil prices in 1986 substitution has stopped industrial energy demand and oil consumption have stagnated interfuel substitution is widely induced by events other than relative price changes energy policy political and institutional constraints changes in economic activity characteristics within individual country sectors

crude oil price fluctuations and saudi arabia s behaviour this study attempts to explain why crude oil prices fluctuate the main cause being the quota regime which characterises the opec agreements given that the saudi oil supply is inelastic in the short term a shock in the oil market is accommodated by an immediate price change by contrast a dominant firm behaviour in the long term causes an output change which is accompanied by a smaller price change this explains why oil prices overshoot the results of a general equilibrium model applied to saudi arabia support this analysis they also indicate that saudi arabia does not have any incentive for altering the crude oil market equilibrium with either positive or negative supply shocks as its welfare declines and that it has an incentive disincentive for intervening if a negative positive demand shock hits the crude oil market a second set of simulations is designed to understand what kind of oecd policy might help to bring down prices a tax cut would worsen the situation whereas policies that can increase the price elasticity of demand seem to be very effective

does competition from private surgical centres improve public hospitals performance evidence from the english national health service abstract this paper examines the impact of a government programme which facilitated the entry of for profit surgical centres to compete against incumbent national health service hospitals in england we examine the impact of competition from these surgical centres on the efficiency measured by pre surgery length of stay for hip and knee replacement patients and case mix of incumbent public hospitals we exploit the fact that the government chose the broad locations where these surgical centres independent sector treatment centres or istcs would be built based on local patient waiting times not length of stay or clinical quality to construct treatment and control groups that are comparable with respect to key outcome variables of interest using a difference in difference estimation strategy we find that the government facilitated entry of surgical centres led to shorter pre surgery length of stay at nearby public hospitals however these new entrants took on healthier patients and left incumbent hospitals treating patients who were sicker this paper highlights a potential trade off that policymakers face when they promote competition from private for profit firms in markets for the provision of public services

abnormal returns and the regulation of nonprofit hospital sales and conversions during the 1990s concerns that nonprofit np hospitals were being sold at below market prices to investor owned io chains helped to prompt the widespread adoption of state laws regulating the sale and conversion of nonprofits in this paper we provide a simple test of under pricing using the io acquirer s abnormal stock market returns at the time of the acquisition prior to regulation we find that io chains did not earn abnormal returns from their acquisitions of nps and earned greater returns from purchasing other io and privately owned hospitals in states that subsequently adopted regulations acquisition activity slowed significantly and acquirer returns became negative efficient markets theory suggests that absent regulation expected merger synergies were already being transferred to the np target and that regulation may have reduced expected synergies or increased the costs of acquiring np hospitals

can market oriented economic reforms contribute to energy efficiency improvement evidence from china since china accelerated its market oriented economic reforms at the end of 1992 its energy intensity has declined 3 6 annually over 1993 2005 however its energy intensity declined 4 2 annually during its first reform period 1979 1992 therefore can we conclude that the accelerated marketization since the end of 1992 has made no contribution to its energy efficiency improvement in order to answer this challenging question we examine the changes of energy own price elasticity as well as the elasticities of substitution between energy and non energy capital and labor in china during the periods of 1979 1992 and 1993 2003 generally in transition or developing economies holding the technology and output level fixed if the energy own price elasticity algebraic value declines or the substitution elasticity between factors rises they will contribute to energy efficiency improvement our empirical study finds that 1 during 1979 1992 the energy own price elasticity is positive 0 285 and capital energy labor energy are both morishima complementary which indicates a distorted energy price and inefficient allocation and 2 during 1993 2003 the own price elasticity for energy is negative 1 236 and capital energy and labor energy are both morishima substitute all factor demands become more elastic and all elasticities of substitution increase the implication is that the accelerated marketization contributes substantially to energy efficiency improvement since 1993 c 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

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

do manufacturing firms react to energy prices evidence from italy abstract the reaction of energy demand to price changes is a key policy issue as it describes the economy s response to changes in market conditions or to policy interventions the issue is even more important for the italian economy highly exposed to energy price changes given its almost complete fossil fuel related energy dependence environmental sensitivity and highly fragmented industrial structure besides the policy issue there is also an important methodological debate concerning the best way to evaluate energy demand elasticities looking at alternative models data and elasticity definitions after a discussion of the main methodological issues and the related empirical literature this paper presents an estimation of factor and fuel demand elasticities for italian industrial firms by using a microeconomic panel in a two stage translog model using cross price and morishima elasticities we obtain information on the magnitude and asymmetry of firms responses to price changes moreover the use of a micro dataset allows the high heterogeneity of italian firms to be considered the results are discussed according to technology intensity sector and firm size our findings show that energy is the most elastic input for all sectors and that capital and energy are substitutes in the low technology sector and weak complements in all others estimated interfuel elasticities show a high degree of demand sensitivity to fuel price changes and the vast majority of cross price elasticities exhibit substitutability appropriate fiscal policies can thus be identified to give an effective impulse in influencing the industrial energy mix by changing relative prices these findings constitute an important foundation for analysing energy demand by italian industrial firms given that empirical literature is particularly rare on the italian case study

hospital competition spillovers and provision of uncompensated care using data for california from 2005 until 2010 we investigate to what extent market competition and the presence of non profits in the area may play a role in equilibrium uncompensated care uc l

major oecd country industrial sector interfuel substitution estimates 1960 1979 abstract a range of static and dynamic translog based expenditure shares models are estimated for non energy producing industrial sectors of the major seven countries of the oecd area sectoral energy volume and fuel efficiency bias variables are shown to be significant over and above individual prices in explaining individual fuel expenditure shares statistically significant own price and cross price elasticities of demand are presented for individual countries with some magnitudes varying considerably across alternative model specifications

voluntary contributions and local public goods in a federation abstract this paper considers nonneutral effects of government spending in a federation of multiple jurisdictions both government spending and private donations finance local public goods redistributive programs that provide transfers for the poor in the standard model government spending has no effect on the public goods as donors reduce their donations one for one in response to an increase in government spending in a federation donors of a jurisdiction donate through federal charities to help the poor in the jurisdiction and the poor in other jurisdictions as well jurisdictions are thus linked through donations such linkage influences donors behavior beyond the traditional crowding out effect as a result government spending has nonneutral effects on the level of public goods

interfuel substitution a meta analysis interfuel substitutability has been of longstanding interest to the energy economics and policy community however no quantitative meta analysis has yet been carried out of this literature this paper fills this gap by analyzing a broad sample of studies of interfuel substitution in the industrial sector manufacturing industry or subindustries or macro economy of a variety of developed and developing economies publication bias is controlled for by including the primary study sample size in the meta regression results for the shadow elasticities of substitution between coal oil gas and electricity for forty six primary studies show that at the level of the industrial sector there are easy substitution possibilities between all the fuel pairs with the exception of gas electricity and coal electricity substitution possibilities seem more constrained at the macro level and less constrained in sub industries estimates also vary across countries publication bias does not seem to be present but model and data specification issues very significantly affect the estimates derived by each individual study estimates from cross section regressions are generally largest fixed effects panel estimates intermediate in magnitude and time series estimates are mostly much smaller econometric research suggests that the fixed effects estimates are likely the best among the existing studies though biased downwards

altruism or moral hazard the impact of hospital uncompensated care pools abstract empirical evidence from new jersey supports theories of hospital altruism from 1987 to 1992 new jersey reimbursed hospitals for uncompensated care through the uncompensated care trust fund the trust fund reduced the shadow price of charity care inducing hospitals to increase their provision of uncompensated care hospitals increased inpatient uncompensated care by an average of 14 8 and statewide uncompensated care increased by 360 million during 1987 1990 empirical evidence suggests that the state effectively addressed the moral hazard problem created by the trust fund by auditing uncompensated care and regulating hospital collection procedures

the revealed objective functions of nonprofit firms although assertions have often been made about the objectives underlying the behavior of nonprofit firms there has been no empirical confirmation of these assertions this article proposes a way to infer a nonprofit organization s objective function by estimating the marginal donative product of its fundraising panel data estimates derived by using hildreth and houck s 1968 random coefficients model suggest that welfare education and arts firms are service maximizers that health firms are budget maximizers and that the objective of research firms cannot be ascertained within the family of objective functions considered

payer type and the returns to bypass surgery evidence from hospital entry behavior in this paper we estimate the returns associated with the provision of coronary artery bypass graft cabg surgery by payer type medicare hmo etc because reliable measures of prices and treatment costs are often unobserved we seek to infer returns from hospital entry behavior we estimate a model of patient flows for cabg patients that provides inputs for an entry model we find that ffs provides a high return throughout the study period medicare which had been generous in the early 1980s now provides a return that is close to zero medicaid appears to reimburse less than average variable costs hmos essentially pay at average variable costs though the return varies inversely with competition

the demise of hospital philanthropy the demise of hospital philanthropy i introduction until the beginning of this century most hospitals primarily served the poor and derived a major portion of their revenue from private philanthropy the more affluent avoided hospital care and were treated in doctors offices and at home starr 1982 rosenberg 1987 this situation changed largely because of technological improvements such as anesthesia and asepsis and the nonpoor began to demand care in hospitals private insurance plans offering the nonpoor nearly complete coverage for hospital care began in the 1930s and spread rapidly after world war ii major health legislation medicare and medicaid was enacted in 1965 extending hospital insurance to the elderly and the poor by the late 1960s hospitals derived nine tenths of their revenue from insurance real donations for medical facility construction rose from 76 million in 1935 to a peak of 2 1 billion in 1965 and fell to 603 million by 1981 1984 dollars 1 in 1984 only 5 percent of the total spent on such construction was funded by philanthropy levit et al 1985 the conventional wisdom has it that private and public hospital insurance has crowded out philanthropic support of hospitals the public insurance argument is consistent with that of abrams and schmitz 1978 and roberts 1984 who maintain that public welfare expenditures reduce or eliminate private giving to the poor this argument appears to extend to private insurance as well this article describes the decline in donations to hospitals from conceptual as well as empirical perspectives we first describe a simple one period model of hospital and donor behavior hospitals choose utility maximizing levels of output while altruistic donors decide how much to contribute to hospitals and how much to spend on other goods the model is used to analyze how insurance various government subsidies and other factors affect hospital and donor behavior the major insight from this model is that although rising insurance coverage tends to increase hospital output in the same way as a lump sum government subsidy the two have different effects on donations to the hospital growing insurance coverage may increase or decrease donations while lump sum subsidies to the hospital will unambiguously crowd out private donations the empirical work following the model incorporates empirical counterparts of the exogenous and donation variables examined in the theoretical section data come from 1 a time series spanning 1935 81 and 2 a single cross section of nonprofit hospitals in 1978 the results indicate that increased insurance coverage for hospital care especially the enactment of medicare and medicaid in the mid 1960s reduced giving to hospitals the contribution of public subsidies for construction varied depending on whether the subsidy more closely resembled a matching or a lump sum subsidy ii model the model consists of a single not for profit hospital and a single representative donor 2 the hospital chooses output n to maximize its utility from output 3 while the donor chooses donations d to maximize utility from total hospital output and other goods y the donor behaves altruistically in that he does not use hospitals himself the behavior of hospital patients is not explicitly modeled although their presence will be felt the output and donation decisions are interrelated since the donor likes hospital output and the level of donations affects the hospital s budge get constraint to untangle the endogenous feedback effects between output and donations the problem is described as a two stage sequential game in the first stage the donor decides how much to donate in the second stage the hospital chooses how much output to produce given the previously determined level of donation of course the donor is acutely aware that the hospital s subsequent output decision will affect his utility

the price and income elasticity of china s natural gas demand a multi sectoral perspective abstract natural gas as a clean low carbon energy will play an important role in the world s low carbon energy transformation in this paper research on the elasticity of natural gas demand is surveyed and it is found that the price and income elasticities of natural gas demand in different sectors are distinctive in particular this paper constructs an autoregressive distribution lag model to study the elasticity of natural gas demand in various sectors of china the results show that except for the residents sector the long run price elasticity of natural gas demand in other sectors is greater than 0 which is contrary to the estimates of developed countries the demand for natural gas is complementary to coal in industrial and power generation sectors which is also different from developed countries the elasticity of natural gas demand in residents sector is lack in price elasticity but abundant in income elasticity which is similar to the developed countries the results also shows that natural gas and oil are substitutes for each other in the transportation sector and natural gas and coal are substitutes for each other in service sector

public service motivation as an argument for government provision a public service motivation psm inclines employees to provide effort out of concern for the impact of that effort on a valued social service though deemed to be important in the literature on public administration this motivation has not been formally considered by economists when a psm exists this paper establishes conditions under which government bureaucracy can better obtain psm motivated effort from employees than a standard profit maximizing firm the model also provides an efficiency rationale for low powered incentives in both bureaucracies and other organizations producing social services 2000 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

would nonprofit workers accept to earn less evidence from france this article focuses on wage differentials between french nonprofit for profit and public sectors considering the public sector allows testing more extensively the labour donation theory preston 1989 the findings support this theory because nonprofit workers accept to earn significantly less than they would earn in the for profit and public sectors they also suggest differences in the motivations of workers in these sectors nonprofit workers are attracted to their work for reasons transcending material compensation

structural optimization and carbon taxation in china s commercial sector abstract given china s economic transformation and upgrading process the green development of commercial sector is more and more important based on the trans log cost function this paper calculates the inter factor and inter fuel substitution effects in china s commercial sector from 1980 to 2016 besides the paper further analyzes the driving factors of the dynamic changes in energy intensity and the impact of carbon taxation in china s commercial sector the main conclusions are as follows 1 capital labor and energy in china s commercial sector negatively correlate with their prices and the self price elasticities of energy labor and capital decline in turn 2 the relationship between labor and capital is substitutional and the same relationship is found when after considering labor and energy and that between energy and capital is complementary 3 demand for energy sources negatively correlates with their prices and there exist complementary relationships between energy sources 4 technical effects and substitution effects can effectively promote the decline of energy intensity in china s commercial sector 5 implementing a 50 rmb tonne carbon taxation will lead to 5 50 energy savings and 6 21 co2 reduction

the economics of vocation or why is a badly paid nurse a good nurse abstract given the longstanding shortage of nurses in many jurisdictions why could not nursing wages be raised to attract more people into the profession we tell a story in which the status of nursing as a vocation implies that increasing wages reduces the average quality of applicants attracted the underlying mechanism accords with the notion that increasing wages might attract the wrong sort of people into the profession and highlights an in efficiency wage mechanism particular to vocations which makes wages sticky up wards the analysis has implications for job design in vocation based sectors such as nursing and teaching

ideals versus dollars donors charity managers and government grants this paper demonstrates how changes in untied lump sum government grants or income from unrestricted endowments will affect the behavior of charities operated by managers with strong philosophical or professional commitments an increase in such funds will reduce the charity s accountability to private donors and lower its fund raising activities the grant will not be spent entirely on raising the quantity of output instead it will permit the charity manager to reduce his or her dependence on the costly solicitation of donors who do not completely share the manager s preferences in order to understand nonprofit charities one must recognize both their diversity and the independent role of their managers in furthering this diversity we will miss much of their special character if we view them as mere conduits seeking faithfully to reify the wishes of their contributors in this paper i demonstrate how an increase or a fall in untied lump sum government grants or income from unrestricted endowments will affect the behavior of charities operated by managers with strong philosophical or professional commitments to some service mixes rather than others an increase in such funds will reduce the charity s accountability to private donors and lower its fund raising activities the grant will not be spent entirely on raising

validating energy oriented cge models although cge models have received heavy usage they are often criticized as being insufficiently validated key parameters are often not econometrically estimated and the performance of the model as a whole is rarely checked against historical outcomes as a consequence questions frequently arise as to how much faith one can put in cge results in this paper we employ a novel approach to the validation of a widely utilized global cge model gtap e by comparing the variance of model generated petroleum price distributions driven by historical demand and supply shocks to the model with observed five year moving average price distributions we conclude that energy demand in gtap e is far too price elastic over this time frame after incorporating the latest econometric estimates of energy demand and supply elasticities we revisit the validation question and find the model to perform more satisfactorily as a further check we compare a deterministic global general equilibrium simulation based on historical realizations over the 2001 2006 period during which petroleum prices rose sharply along with growing global energy demands as anticipated by the stochastic simulations the revised model parameters perform much better than the original gtap e parameters in this global general equilibrium context

factors influencing changes in energy consumption the case of italy 1975 85 abstract during the last years several authors have been studying the main factors influencing changes in energy consumption ie production volume production structure and energy intensity thus a number of methods to quantify these factors have been suggested in this paper one of those methods is partially modified and is applied to the italian situation for the period 1975 85 in order to try to point out the role played by the various factors which have caused changes in energy consumption in italy

the long term relationships among china s energy consumption sources and adjustments to its renewable energy policy abstract to reduce its consumption of coal and oil in its primary energy consumption china promotes the development of renewable energy resources i have analysed the long term relationship among china s primary energy consumption sources changes in coal consumption lead those in the consumption of other energy sources in the long term coal and oil fuels substitute for each other equally the long term elasticities of china s coal consumption relative to its hydroelectricity consumption were greater than one and nearly equal during the two sample periods therefore increased hydroelectricity consumption did not imply a reduction in coal consumption china holds abundant hydroelectricity wind and solar energy potential china must prevent an excessive escalation of its economy and resultant energy demand to realise a meaningful substitution of coal with hydroelectricity moreover china must develop and use wind and solar energy sources natural gas can be a good substitute for coal given its moderate price growth and affordable price levels

estimating the rebound effect in us manufacturing energy consumption abstract the energy price shocks of the 1970s are usually assumed to have increased the search for new energy saving technologies where eventual gains in energy efficiencies will reduce the real per unit price of energy services and hence the consumption of energy will rise and partially offset the initial reduction in the usage of energy sources this is the rebound effect which is estimated for the us manufacturing sector using time series data applying the dynamic ols method dols when allowing for asymmetric price effects the rebound effect is found to be approximately 24 for the us manufacturing sector

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

a total eclipse of the heart compensation strategies in entrepreneurial nonprofits abstract we examine how shifting resource dependencies influence compensation strategy during commercial transitions within entrepreneurial nonprofits analyzing a longitudinal sample of 4732 organizations we show how compensation strategies shift non linearly as nonprofits transition from contributed resource dependence to market based resource dependence dynamic quadratic models unveil a dual threshold of commercialization concerning this transition nonprofits at moderate stages of commercialization contend with competing dependencies from both contributed and market based sources resulting in a decrease in compensation spending and an increase in part time employment at higher stages contributed resource dependence is eclipsed by market based dependence reflected in increasing compensation spending and full time employment

liberalisation consumption heterogeneity and the dynamics of energy prices in this study the methodology var and the cointegration analysis are used to examine the dynamic interaction among the energy prices of the competitor energy sources in a liberalised market data from the uk market were applied and models for the residential and industrial sectors were developed our results indicate the existence of long run relationships between the energy prices before and after the liberalisation implying the possibility of substitution among the different forms of energy however the results appear to be also largely influenced by external variables not included in the models that may be reducing the importance of the energy prices over their own evolution and offsetting the basic substitution relationships the general results of the impulse response functions both for the residential and industrial sectors present low statistical significance which seems to be due to the still slow rate of adjustment of the energy market to price changes along with the immaturity of the liberalisation process taking into consideration the results some routes for future research are pointed out namely the need to include in the analysis variables which would proxy the general state of the economy

an accurate measurement of the crowd out effect income effect and price effect for charitable contributions in the past empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions the two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis this paper addresses both of these problems

brown backstops versus the green paradox abstract anticipated climate policies are ineffective when fossil fuel owners respond by shifting supply intertemporally the green paradox this mechanism relies crucially on the exhaustibility of fossil fuels we analyze the effect of anticipated climate policies on emissions in a simple model with two fossil fuels one scarce and dirty e g oil the other abundant and dirtier e g coal we derive conditions for a green orthodox anticipated climate policies may reduce current emissions the model can also be used to analyze spatial carbon leakage calibrations suggest that intertemporal carbon leakage from 0 to 8 is a relatively minor concern

a pooled dynamic analysis of interfuel substitution in industrial energy demand by the g 7 countries a dynamic version of considine s 1990 linear logit model is used to obtain theoretically consistent estimates of long run price elasticities from pooled intercountry data on industrial energy consumption this model also provides a rare direct estimate of the important rate of dynamic adjustment revealing a median lag of ten years the long run demands for oil and coal are the most elastic and the strongest channels for interfuel substitution are between oil and natural gas with no significant evidence of complementarity between fuels

quality reputation and the choice of organizational form this paper revisits the hypothesis that nonprofit organizations emerge in markets that are characterized by contractual incompleteness because they ensure consumers against opportunistic behavior we extend the glaeser and shleifer glaeser e shleifer a 2001 not for profit entrepreneurs journal of public economics 81 99 115 framework which studies an entrepreneur s optimal choice of organizational form and service quality when quality is non contractible into a repeated interaction setting the main result is that when reputations can be sustained then for profit status is the preferred organizational form and high quality services are ensured this finding suggests that existing explanations of nonprofit organizations that focus entirely on contractual imperfections in the producer consumer relationship may be inadequate

some anomalies in the production strategy of a labour managed firm however been given to the appropriate objective function of a labour managed cooperative firm in this paper we show that the conventional formulation of the objective function is incompatible with a homogeneous production function more precisely we prove that a labour managed firm with a production function homogeneous of degree a 1 the level of output depends only on the degree of homogeneity and is otherwise independent of the structural form of the production function in particular the level of output is independent of the price of capital this last result also holds if the production function is homothetic although these shortcomings apply specifically to homogeneous production processes the use of such production functions is so widespread that any objective function of a firm which is incompatible with them significantly reduces its analytical usefulness consequently we think that further research in the theory of labour managed firms will require a reformulation of the objective function in order to remove this anomaly

discretionary profit in subsidised housing markets in the subsidised housing sector building corporations can use their market power as purchasers to raise output of subsidised housing to a level higher than it is with perfect competition on both sides of the market this holds true if the building society is perfectly x efficient the proposition is not necessarily true if the corporation maximises a utility function in which discretionary profit or organisational slack is an argument the x inefficient building society may set output higher or lower than with perfect competition if the government grants a fixed subsidy per house and tries to constrain x inefficiency by imposing a maximum price this might be an incentive for the building corporation to maintain a planned shortage of subsidised houses however housing shortages will be smaller and welfare possibly greater than it is with perfect competition the existence of a perfectly competitive non subsidised housing sector is for the building corporation an incentive to increase strategically the output of subsidised housing and reduce planned shortages but it does not necessarily eliminate such shortages

dynamic income progressive taxes and the timing of charitable contributions using an econometric model of charitable giving and a 10 year panel of tax return data i find that previous studies have underestimated the effects of permanent income and overestimated the effects of permanent changes in tax prices the significant statutory tax changes that occurred during the 1980s especially in 1986 serve to identify the key model parameters my results imply that people smooth their giving when transitory income changes but also time their giving to exploit transitory changes in tax prices the results also raise questions about how effectively the tax incentives permanently influence the level rather than just the timing of charitable giving by individuals

exemption or taxation for profits of non profits an answer from a model incorporating managerial discretion many non profit organizations engage in bothcharitable and purely commercial activities whereprofits from the latter are used to finance theformer should business income be tax exempted becauseof its cross subsidization function the effects ofexemption on the product mix are analysed using amodel incorporating managerial discretion acrucially different assumption from that of thecurrent literature under given assumptions tax exemption of commercial income emerges as a lessefficient means of supporting the charitable productthan alternative government measures such as anoutput subsidy

voluntary donations and public expenditures in a federal system proponents of the new federalism argue that nonprofit organizations and local governments will fully offset federal social service expenditure cutbacks the author analyzes this proposition as a competitive game in which donations are motivated by private and public good considerations the author characterizes the response of political economic equilibrium to exogenous changes in federal expenditures when local voters are cognizant of donor reactions partial replacement is the most likely outcome though others are possible copyright 1987 by american economic association

replacing trust with control a field test of motivation crowd out theory results in behavioural economics suggest that material incentives can crowd out motivation if agents are mission oriented rather than self interested we test this prediction on a sample of non profit organisations in sweden traditionally contracts with the main principal the swedish foreign aid agency have been based on trust and self regulation we designed a randomised policy experiment effectively replacing the trust based contract with an increased level of monitoring from the principal overall using both self reported and observed measures of outreach we find that the intervention increased outreach reduced expenditures and reduced the number of financial irregularities

on the theory of international trade between capitalist and labour managed countries abstract this paper attempts to establish a model of international trade between capitalist and labour managed countries and to reexamine whether or not the basic theorems of the traditional trade theory carry over to environments characterized by the coexistence of capitalist and labour managed countries

religiosity and state welfare abstract the catholic sex abuse scandals reduced both membership and religiosity in the catholic church because government spending on welfare may substitute for the religious provision of social services we consider whether this plausibly exogenous decline in religiosity affected several measures of the public taste toward government and spending on welfare between 1990 and 2008 in places where there were more scandals individuals state a preference for less government provision of social services in contrast a higher level of abuse is also associated with an increase in voting for democratic candidates for president state legislatures and the us house of representatives and an increase in per capita government welfare spending although this increase is insufficient to replace the decrease in catholic provided charity

fossil fuel producing economies have greater potential for industrial interfuel substitution abstract this study analyzes industrial interfuel substitution in an international context using a large unbalanced panel dataset of 63 countries we find that compared to other countries fossil fuel producing economies have higher short term interfuel substitution elasticities this difference increases further in the long run as fossil fuel producing countries have a considerably longer adjustment of their fuel using capital stock these results imply lower economic cost for policies aimed at climate abatement and more efficient utilization of energy resources in energy intensive economies

the charitable activities of terrorist organizations violent groups sometimes invest significant resources in social work notably in the form of charities and ngos the present paper models a terrorist group s charities as a means to advertise its cause in order to raise popular support the analysis explains how different types of organizations arise in equilibrium depending on government policies then the interaction between a purely terrorist group and an independent local ngo is examined it is shown that a purely terrorist group always invests in more attacks than an integrated terrorist charity organization furthermore the latter may have more ngo activity than a separate local ngo

does it matter who your buyer is the role of nonprofit mission in the market for corporate control of hospitals abstract the hospital industry is one of this country s largest mixed industries with for profit nonprofit and government hospitals operating in the same local markets but how do ownership types differ previous studies have compared costs among different hospitals however these studies have not been entirely successful because costs cannot be meaningfully compared without controlling for hard to measure quality of service in this study we look to the market for corporate control or takeovers for evidence of ownership related differences we find that nonprofit and for profit firms pay different prices and that these differences relate to the nonprofit s mission specifically nonprofits and for profits pay the same price when buying for profits but nonprofits pay less when buying a like minded nonprofit so religious nonprofits pay less for other religious nonprofits for example the resulting dual price equilibrium suggests that nonprofits have a different objective than do for profits but

organizational slack in subsidized nonprofit institutions informal objectives of managers next to the formal objective of the organization can be a source of organizational slack or x inefficiency in nonprofit organizations if the organization is subsidized the donor can restrain organizational slack by choosing an appropriate subsidy system four subsidy systems are discussed output input revenue and lump sum subsidy output subsidy reduces slack most the ranking of input subsidy compared with lump sum subsidy depends on the elasticity of demand for output revenue subsidy equals input subsidy changes in the subsidy regime for residential adult educations in the netherlands turn out to have been inconsistent

fighting city hall entry deterrence and technology upgrades in cable tv markets this article investigates how private firms respond to potential entry from public firms this paper uses a data set of over 3 000 u s cable tv systems to present evidence consistent with entry deterrence incumbent cable tv firms upgrade faster when located in markets with a potential municipal entrant however the same systems are then slower to offer new products enabled by the upgrade suggesting upgrades in these markets occur for strategic reasons incumbent cable systems also upgrade faster in response to municipal entry threats than to private entry threats understanding how private firms respond to potential entry from public firms is especially important in light of recent u s government entry into several industries this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

information spillovers and connectedness networks in the oil and gas markets abstract this paper investigates the oil gas relationship from a multi scale perspective by combining the connectedness network framework and the ensemble empirical mode decomposition eemd method the empirical results show that the direction and magnitude of the information flow between oil and gas returns behave differently across time scales in general wti and its refinery products tend to act as net information transmitters while the united states and united kingdom natural gas markets act as net receivers the total spillover connectedness for the oil and gas markets as measured by a rolling window approach has dynamic volatile characteristics the robustness of the results is shown by substituting brent for wti

partners in giving the crowding in effects of uk government grants abstract this study examines the determinants of voluntary donations to uk charities using empirical specifications that combine error component and simultaneous equations methods in a series of tests we identify the one way fixed effects endogenous representation for government grants as the best empirical model when this endogeneity is taken into account government grants cause significant crowding in for the full sample and the two largest cohorts price coefficients are negative and fund raising coefficients are positive religion charities are net revenue maximizers whereas other charity cohorts fund raise short of net revenue maximization

the impacts of energy prices on energy intensity evidence from china in this paper we present a review of the deregulation of energy prices in china between 1985 and 2004 and assess the impacts of changes in energy prices on aggregate energy intensity and coal oil electricity intensity we used time series data to provide estimates of energy price elasticities empirical results showed that 1 the own price elasticities of coal oil and aggregate energy were negative in periods both before and after 1995 implying that higher relative prices of different energy types lead to the decrease in coal oil and aggregate energy intensities however the positive own price elasticity of electricity after 1995 probably indicates that the price effect was weaker than other factors such as income effect and population effect 2 the impacts of energy prices were asymmetric over time 3 sectoral adjustment also drove the decrease in aggregate energy intensity although raising energy prices to boost efficiency of energy use seems to be an effective policy tool other policy implications concerned with energy prices such as energy supply security and fuel poverty must also be considered

charitable motives and bidding in charity auctions research on bidding in auctions has generally relied on the assumption of self interested bidders this work relaxes that assumption in the context of charity auctions because understanding charitable motives has important implications for auction design and charities fundraising strategies this study investigates bidders specific types of charitable motives and the strength of these motives we carry out three controlled field experiments consisting of real life auctions conducted on a local internet auction site we use a novel design in which we simultaneously run charity and noncharity auctions for identical products and vary the percentage donated to charity results show that auctions with proceeds donated to charity lead to significantly higher selling prices a result due to a higher bidding by bidders with charitable motives rather than to increased bidder entry we also find that increased prices only occur when the charitable donation is a percentage of the auction revenue and that a fixed charitable donation associated with each auction has no effect on prices furthermore we find that prices are increasing in the percentage donated to charity we find considerable support for a model of voluntary shill like bidding where charitable bidders try to increase proceeds in charity auctions we also find that auctions with 25 of revenue donated to charity had higher net revenue than noncharity auctions hence companies may be able to use charity auctions as part of a corporate social responsibility strategy and at the same time increase profitability even though they donate part of the proceeds to charity

compensation in the nonprofit sector we investigate the determinants of pay in the nonprofit sector using data for 25 55 year olds from the 1994 88 current population survey outgoing rotation groups our results are consistent with the hypothesis that compensation is primarily determined in competitive markets without labor donations to nonprofit employers one implication is that nonprofit workers receive virtually the same wages as observationally equivalent employees in similar positions with profit seeking enterprises we cannot rule out the possibility of nonprofit penalties or premiums for selected groups however the differentials are generally small and competition appears to play a dominant role in nonprofit wage setting

demand elasticities in oecd dynamical aspects abstract four models with different lag structures are used to express final energy demand in oecd from 1960 1982 as a function of real gdp and average energy price the income and long run price elasticities are not significantly dependent on the model specification but the koyck lag scheme estimated in its distributed lag form is found to give the most satisfactory results the statistical properties of the data together with evidence of trends in the elasticities both suggest that the period of falling real prices prior to 1971 is not comparable to the present period for the period after 1971 an income elsticity of 1 02 and a long run price elasticity of 0 37 are obtained

the energy demand in the british and german industrial sectors heterogeneity and common factors abstract this paper estimates energy demands for the german and british industrial sectors over the 1978 2004 and the 1991 2004 samples from time series models we can conclude that there is a considerable variation in the value of the coefficients across sectors even though energy demands with sensible parameters can rarely be estimated when using a panel approach the ability of some estimators to allow for diversity across subsectors was an important factor in explaining the estimates for price elasticity on the other hand correlation across panel members or common factors did not markedly influence our results with regard to the estimated parameters our preferred choice for elasticity of economic activity and price in the longer sample is 0 52 and 0 64 similar values are found in the case of the shorter samples bearing in mind the high price elasticity energy taxes can be considered an effective strategy for reducing energy consumption

agency costs in environmental not for profits we examine the behavior of not for profits using utility maximization this leads to testable hypotheses regarding the costs of agency associated with the activities of not for profits our tests are similar to those previously employed regarding not for profit objectives but our interpretation is different our empirical test uses data on environmental groups unlike previous studies biased toward a finding of service maximization we account for endogenous explanatory variables a weak statement of our results is that managers of environmental groups derive positive marginal utility from expenditures for purposes other than providing services there may also be empirical support for a stronger conclusion

the dilemma of accountability for professionals a challenge for mainstream management theories professional institutions are increasingly confronted by fiscal constraints and political pressures to improve and increase their accountability in a competitive consumer driven market accordingly the need to ensure efficiency and accountability is of strategic importance this article reports on a qualitative study of medical professionals that assessed the utility of financial incentives and external control methods derived from agency theory to ensure accountability of professionals the authors argue that approaches derived from stewardship and institutional theories can extend the principal agent perspective to sustain greater social and ethical accountability

the social role of not for profit organizations hospital provision of charity care during the 1980s the state of new york shifted from a straight block grant to a matching grant method for reimbursing hospitals with the matching rate varying from 0 to 75 percent across years these changes allow estimation of pure income and price effects for hospitals supply of uncompensated care charity and bad debts the price efrect is positive and significant but no income effect was found hospitals in more concentrated markets provide more charity care as do teaching hospitals and the presence of public hospitals in a market reduces private hospitals provision of charity care

hospital profits the effects of reimbursement policies this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of cost based reimbursement cbr on hospital costs and charges it takes issue with previous analyses which have treated cbr as paying economic costs plus a mark up and have concluded that the mark up is too small to significantly distort hospital decision making the basic thesis here is that if reimbursement is based on costs accounting costs become a price to cost paying patients and will be optimized to maximize revenue a hospital serving both cost and charge paying private patients can set two price schedules accounting profits ratio of charges to costs are not a measure of economic profit but of relative prices to these two groups of patients in the absence of constraints from regulation or patient co payment the optimum level of accounting costs would be infinite in practice the medicare reimbursement formula links allowable costs to charges received from charge paying patients this formula creates incentives for the hospital to raise charges above the single price profit maximizing monopoly level this inflationary effect of the medicare formula does not presuppose that medicare pays less than full cost the empirical analysis of hospital laboratory costs and charges generally supports the predictions for other departments the conclusions are consistent but more tentative because of data limitations overall evidence suggests minimal cross subsidy between cost and charge paying patients comparisons of cost and charge levels in for profit voluntary non profit and government hospitals are presented but it is emphasized that inferences about relative efficiency and profitability cannot be drawn from accounting data given the incentives created by cbr

manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the impacts of changes in output industry structure and energy intensity this paper examines trends in manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the changes that occured between 1973 and 1987 into the effects of changes in aggregate manufacturing activity industry structure and energy intensities measured at the industry group level while manufacturing production grew in every country except the uk the rate of growth was variable from nation to nation structural change led to modest reductions in energy use in most countries although in norway structural change led to substantial growth in energy use the reduction in energy intensities was strikingly uniform across all nations ranging from 20 norway to 36 japan over the period of the analysis while other studies have used divisia decomposition techniques we use an alternative method based on laspeyres indices a comparison of the two techniques shows that they yield closely similar empirical results although the laspeyres approach is more easily interpreted while the interactions between changes in structure and intensity are arbitrarily assigned to the two factors by the divisia approach the lapeyres method yields interaction terms that explicitly account for such effects

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate

market share and the illusion of power can blue cross force hospitals to discount researchers in health care financing have claimed that large private insurers like blue cross frequently exercise monopsony power to obtain discounts from normal hospital charges they claim that the monopsony power derives from a large blue cross share of a given hospital cost shifting whereby hospitals offset the discount by raising charges to less powerful customers this paper re examines both theoretically and empirically the conditions necessary for a private insurer to extract discounts from a hospital we demonstrate that the theoretical conditions necessary for blue cross to force a discount do not exist in the indiana market using revenue data from 110 indiana hospitals we reject the traditional claim that blue cross pays less than other insurers as a function of market share