comparing the performance of health care systems an alternative approach the health care system in the united states has been diagnosed as a moribund institution by a large number of media commentators and health policy analysts continually rising health care costs and inadequate health insurance coverage for approximately thirty seven million people are cited as two of the most visible symptoms supporting their diagnosis most of these individuals see little chance for the u s health care system to recover given its present design full recovery they believe requires the successful transplant of a health care system from another country the health care systems in europe and canada where government is assigned a much larger role than in the united states are argued to offer universal health care coverage and simultaneously contain health care costs simple comparative statistics appear to support the view that the performance of the u s health care system could be improved through a new health care system design infant mortality in the united states ranked twentieth among twenty four member countries of the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd in 1988 yet health care expenditures in the united states comprised 11 8 percent of gross domestic product in 1989 while the comparable average for all oecd countries was only 7 4 percent 28 these statistics portray the u s health care system as being deficient and therefore unable to offer quality medical services at a reasonable price given the limited stock of information that exists on this issue however it is ill advised to place full blame for the seemingly dismal performance on the u s health care system the simple international comparisons fail to take into account that differences in performance are not solely due to variations in health care systems while the design of a health care system including the financing scheme reimbursement method and organization of production is indeed important because it influences how various economic technological and demographic characteristics of a country are transformed into health outcomes the performance of the health care system also depends on the magnitude of these national characteristics as well a proper analysis would try to determine how the health care system itself specifically influences the performance of health

a cluster analysis on income elasticity variations and us pharmaceutical expenditures this paper examines the relationship between household income and outpatient prescribed medicines in the usa based on a sample of 2872 privately insured patients from the 1987 nmes data set the analysis is performed on regional typologies of different socioeconomic profiles of patients only a few groups show positive income elasticity

are consumers spending decisions in line with an euler equation evaluating a new survey of german consumers we test whether individual consumption spending decisions are formed according to an euler equation model we find that consumers are more likely to inc

what drives health care expenditure baumol s model of unbalanced growth revisited the share of health care expenditure in gdp rises rapidly in virtually all oecd countries causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public yet economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are this paper revisits baumol s baumol w j 1967 macroeconomics of unbalanced growth the anatomy of urban crisis american economic review 57 3 415 426 model of unbalanced growth showing that the latter offers a ready explanation for the observed inexorable rise in health care expenditure the main implication of baumol s model in this context is that health care expenditure is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth this hypothesis is tested empirically using data from a panel of 19 oecd countries our tests yield robust evidence in favor of baumol s theory

discussion of international differences in the timeliness conservatism and classification of earnings pope and walker examine differences in the timeliness and conservatism of u s and u k reported earnings they conclude that the u s accounting regime appears significantly more conservative than the u k regime when comparing earnings before extraordinary items however when comparing bottom line earnings they find the opposite the paper contributes to research on international differences in accounting and their causes and consequences the conference discussion focused on accounting differences between the united kingdom and the united states the assumptions underlying the analyses in the paper and the interpretation of the results in the following sections i discuss the authors research design choices examining in turn the motivation research agenda and specification issues

information in prices about future earnings abstract stock return over a period reflects the market s revision in expectation of future earnings accounting earnings over the same period however have limited ability to reflect such revised expectations therefore returns anticipate earnings changes and the earnings response coefficient from a regression of returns on contemporaneous earnings changes is biased toward zero we reduce this bias by including leading period returns in price earnings regressions the resulting estimated earnings response coefficient magnitudes suggest that the capital market on average views earnings changes to be largely permanent this is consistent with the random walk time series property of annual earnings

direct measurement of popular price expectations expectations are an important determinant of economic behavior the analysis of economic expectations however has suffered from inadequate measurement throughout the literature expectations have been treated as unobservable and have therefore been measured only indirectly the object of this paper is to develop and test a direct measure of the expectations of inflation a particularly critical economic variable a direct measure of inflationary expectations is here taken to be one constructed from a sample survey in which individuals are asked to state their expectations explicitly the paper focuses on a popular forecast of the rate of change of consumer prices in the forthcoming year as calculated from responses to the survey of consumer finances scf this measure is presented in section i the scf and others like it have existed for some time but a few recent studies notwithstanding most economists continue to regard survey measures as inherently unreliable their principal criticism is that the opinions an individual expresses

government social spending and gdp has there been a change in social policy government social spending gss is made up of a very heterogeneous range of variables monetary transfers for retirement or illness unemployment benefits family services active labour market policies and health expenditure we believe that each of these components is of enormous importance to the economic development of a country as has often been affirmed however gss is one of the economic aggregates most sensitive to the ups and downs of economic growth in moments of crisis sharp cuts are almost immediate and these may or may not be recovered when times are good in this article we examine the sensitivity of gss to the evolution of gross domestic product gdp in order to reveal the relationship between the two

alternative estimators of cointegrating parameters in models with nonstationary data an application to us export demand this article presents monte carlo simulations which compare the empirical performance of two alternative single equation estimators of the equilibrium parameters in a dynamic relationship the estimators considered are stock and watson s dynamic ordinary least squares dols estimator and bewley s transformation of the general autoregressive distributed lag model the results indicate that the bewley transformation produces a lower mean square error as well as superior serial correlation properties even with lower truncation lags for the lagged variables included in the estimation equation an application is then provided which examines the nature of the equilibrium relationship between aggregate us exports world trade and the us real exchange rate this confirms that estimation of the equilibrium parameters of this relationship by the bewley transformation produces results which are superior to estimation by dols

how do firms form their expectations new survey evidence author s coibion o gorodnichenko y kumar s abstract 2018 american economic association all rights reserved we survey new zealand firms and document novel facts about their macroeconomic beliefs there is widespread dispersion in beliefs about past and future macroeconomic conditions especially inflation this dispersion in beliefs is consistent with firms incentives to collect and process information using experimental methods we find that firms update their beliefs in a bayesian manner when presented with new information about the economy and that changes in their beliefs affect their decisions inflation is not generally perceived as being important to business decisions so firms devote few resources to collecting and processing information about inflation

social security income and health care spending evidence from the social security notch the paper exploits social security legislation changes to identify the causal effect of social security income on out of pocket medical expenditures of the elderly using the 1986 1994 consumer expenditure survey and an instrumental variables strategy the empirical results show that health care expenditures are responsive to changes in social security income for elderly individuals with less than a high school education the estimated income elasticities are between 1 41 and 3 47 depending on the outcome measures and are statistically significant at conventional levels the findings are in contrast to existing studies that find a small income elasticity at the individual household level this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

health care expenditures and gdp panel data unit root test results abstract this short paper presents unit root test results for time series on per capita national health care expenditures and gross domestic product in the oecd unlike the country by country test used by hansen p king a 1996 the determinants of health care expenditure a cointegration approach j health econ 15 127 137 the test we employ exploits the panel nature of the oecd data using this approach we are able to reject the null hypothesis that these series contain unit roots no single test is likely to be definitive in this rapidly evolving area of econometric research however our results help to mitigate concern that panel data analyses of national health care expenditures are misspecified

does higher government debt link to higher social expenditure new method new evidence abstractscholars believe that higher social expenditures are usually linked with higher government debts whereas higher debts reduce social expenditures however it is reasonable to speculate that higher government debt may contribute to higher social spending while fiscal deficits occur during a recession which commonly creates greater demand for social expenditure for a deeper investigation this paper revisits the dynamic relationship between social spending and public debts in the time frequency domain using the novel wavelet coherency analysis as well as the phase difference technique to derive the co moved and causal relationships between social spending and public debts in 13 oecd countries the evidence identifies a dynamic relationship between variables while higher social expenditures increase government debts the shocks from government debts to social expenditures are conversely uncertain we discover that higher government debt does reduce social expenditures but it may be linked to h

the determinants of canadian provincial health expenditures evidence from a dynamic panel this article seeks to reveal the magnitude of the income elasticity of health expenditure and the impact of non income determinants of health expenditure across canada for this purpose panel data on gross domestic product the relative price of health care the share of publicly funded health expenditure the share of senior population and the life expectancy at birth have been used to investigate the determinants of canadian provincial health expenditures over a 28 year period dynamic models of health expenditure are analysed via generalized instrumental variables giv and generalized method of moments gmm results indicate that the long run income elasticity of health expenditure is substantially lower than one thus health care is far from being a luxury in canada

demand for medical care consumption and cointegration abstract this paper considers a generalized version of grossman s health capital model and derives a cointegration restriction the restriction is tested using aggregate us data and the results are consistent with the prediction of the model

a naive sticky information model of households inflation expectations this paper provides a simple epidemiology model where households when forming their inflation expectations rationally adopt the past release of inflation with certain probability rather than the forward looking newspaper forecast as suggested in carroll 2003 macroeconomic expectations of households and professional forecasters quarterly journal of economics 118 269 298 the posterior model probabilities based on the michigan survey data strongly support the proposed model we also extend the agent based epidemiology model by deriving for it a simple adaptation which is suitable for estimation our results show that this model is able to capture the heterogeneity in households expectations very well

inflation expectations and behavior do survey respondents act on their beliefs we compare the inflation expectations reported by consumers in a survey with their behavior in a financially incentivized investment experiment the survey is found to be informative in the sense that the beliefs reported by the respondents are correlated with their choices in the experiment more importantly we find evidence that most respondents act on their inflation expectations showing patterns consistent with economic theory respondents whose behavior cannot be rationalized tend to have lower education and lower numeracy and financial literacy these findings help confirm the relevance of inflation expectations surveys and provide support to the microfoundations of modern macroeconomic models

the information content of losses abstract this study hypothesizes that because shareholders have a liquidation option losses are not expected to perpetuate they are thus less informative than profits about the firm s future prospects the results are consistent with the hypothesis they also show that the documented increase in the earnings response coefficent as the cumulation period increases appears to be due exclusively to the effect of losses the liquidation option effect extends to profitable cases where earnings are low enough to make the option attractive alternating explanations for the low informativeness of losses such as mean reversal of earnings are not supported by the tests

aggregate health care expenditures and national income is health care a luxury good it is well known that a strong relationship exists between national expenditures on health care and national income this has been used to suggest that health care is a luxury good and that factors such as the type of health care delivery system in a country are of little importance in determining expenditure levels this paper argues that these implications rely upon the application of microeconomic analysis to macroeconomic data and that this is not appropriate as well as raising questions about the inferences drawn from previous studies new empirical evidence is presented which casts some doubts on previous findings international comparisons are based on purchasing power parity rather than exchange rate conversions underlining the importance of prices as well as quantities in the relationship and leading to the conclusion that the aggregate data show health care to be if anything a necessity rather than a luxury good

the expected price of keeping up with the joneses abstract inflation expectations elicited in surveys have been found to exhibit large dispersion across individuals although several explanations have been proposed none fully explain this puzzle we explore in this paper a new behavioral factor social comparison using original survey data we find that respondents who feel they are falling behind compared to their peers report significantly and substantially higher inflation expectations we argue that this result is consistent with an experience based belief formation model in which those unable to keep up with the joneses overweight the high prices of aspiration goods they are unable to purchase

where modern macroeconomics went wrong this paper provides a critique of the dsge models that have come to dominate macroeconomics during the past quarter century it argues that at the heart of the failure were the wrong microfoundations which failed to incorporate key aspects of economic behaviour e g incorporating insights from information economics and behavioural economics inadequate modelling of the financial sector meant they were ill suited for predicting or responding to a financial crisis and a reliance on representative agent models meant they were ill suited for analysing either the role of distribution in fluctuations and crises or the consequences of fluctuations on inequality the paper proposes alternative benchmark models that may be more useful both in understanding deep downturns and responding to them

economic literacy and inflation expectations evidence from a laboratory experiment we present experimental evidence of a link between economic literacy and inflation forecast accuracy the experiment investigates two channels through which economic literacy may enable better forecasts i choice of information and ii use of information more literate subjects choose more relevant information and use the given information more effectively starting from a 10th percentile score the boost in literacy from taking an economics course predicts a 0 64 standard deviation decline in mean absolute forecasting error our findings suggest that a significant portion of demographic heterogeneity in inflation expectations observed in survey data may be driven by heterogeneity in economic literacy

the economics of moral hazard revisited pauly s 1968 pauly m 1968 the economics of moral hazard comment american economic review 58 531 537 analysis of the welfare loss from insurance assumes that medical care consumption is not determined by income but recent studies suggest it is this study argues that 1 pauly s analysis overstates the welfare loss because it includes the effect of income on consumption 2 the relevant income effect is derived from income transfer from the healthy to the ill that occur when the probability of illness is less than 1 and 3 the welfare loss can be considered the transaction cost of insurance

inflation expectations as a policy tool abstract we assess the prospects for central banks using inflation expectations as a policy tool for stabilization purposes we review recent work on how expectations of agents are formed and how they affect their economic decisions empirical evidence suggests that inflation expectations of households and firms affect their actions but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear especially for firms two additional limitations prevent policy makers from being able to actively manage inflation expectations first available surveys of firms expectations are systematically deficient which can only be addressed through the creation of large nationally representative surveys of firms second neither households nor firms expectations respond much to monetary policy announcements in low inflation environments we provide suggestions for how monetary policy makers could pierce this veil of inattention through new communication strategies as well as the potential pitfalls to trying to do so

equity in the finance and delivery of health care some tentative cross country comparisons textabstractequity is widely acknowledged to be an important goal in the field of health care indeed mclachlan and maynard 1982 have gone so far as to suggest that the vast majority of the population would elect for equity to be the prime consideration p 556 a view endorsed by mooney 1986 p 145 several researchers have investigated how successful their own country s delivery and or financing system is in achieving its stated equity goals in general the strategy of these studies is to compare the current situation with some ideal or target situation le grand 1978 for example in what has become a classic study in the field compares the distributions across socio economic groups of illness and public expenditure on health care in britain in 1972 and concludes that the national health service nhs has failed to achieve equity in the delivery of health care

public private mix of health expenditure a political economy and quantitative analysis this paper constructs a simple model to examine decisions on public and private health spending under majority voting in the model agents with heterogeneous incomes choose how much to consume and spend on health care and vote for public health expenditure the health status of an agent is determined by a ces composite of public and private health expenditure the existence and uniqueness of the voting equilibrium are established a quantitative exercise reveals the importance of the relative effectiveness of public and private health expenditure and their substitutability in determining the public private mix of health expenditure and in accounting for the observed differences across a sample of 22 advanced democratic countries

review of the literature on the determinants of healthcare expenditure this study reviews the literature on determinants of healthcare expenditure for the period 1998 to 2007 the methodology combines searches in the mesh database of pubmed with the search in the principal journals of health economics 20 primary studies were found that met the criteria for inclusion no single pattern of results is clearly identified among the 20 articles four consider income to be the principal determinant of healthcare expenditure two of them jointly with population ageing six highlight population ageing as against six others that emphasize the proximity to death the remaining six do not focus on a specific variable or focus on another variable e g technological progress or territorial decentralization 11 of the 20 articles calculate the income elasticity of demand only two of them obtaining a value greater than 1 thus cataloguing healthcare expenditure as a luxury good there is therefore no unanimity in the variables and econometric regressions of healthcare expenditure in

perceived inflation under loss aversion building on prospect theory we apply the concept of loss aversion to the formation of inflation perceptions and test empirically for nonlinearities in the inflation perceptions relation for a panel of 10 euro area countries specifically under the assumption of loss aversion inflation changes above a certain reference rate will be perceived more strongly rejecting rationality of inflation perceptions in general under symmetric loss and in a majority of cases under flexible loss functions panel smooth transition models give evidence of nonlinearities in the inflation perceptions relation regarding both actual inflation and time this result is confirmed by dynamic fixed effects estimates where the slope of the estimated value function is significantly steeper in the loss region and the implied average reference inflation rate is found close to 2

frequency bias in consumers perceptions of inflation an experimental study we investigate whether the perception of economy wide inflation is affected by the frequency with which various goods prices are observed we provide novel experimental evidence that consumers perceptions of aggregate inflation are systematically biased toward the perceived inflation rates of the frequently purchased items this frequency bias may affect consumers consumption and investment decisions and thus have important macroeconomic consequences it may also explain why consumers typically over estimate inflation in surveys during periods where frequently purchased non durable goods are inflating faster than durables

public information and inflation expectations microeconometric evidence from a natural experiment abstract governments provide public information to reduce information imperfections do households rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions to identify the importance of public information in households price expectations we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in ecuador where the published inflation rate had been different from the correct rate over a period of fourteen months due to a software error we find that the public signal about prices plays an important role in households price expectations and the change in price expectations affects their savings choices the effect is stronger for better educated and older people

is social protection a necessity or a luxury good new multivariate cointegration panel data results the aim of this paper is to test the claim that social protection is a luxury good therefore gdp elasticity of selected social protection expenditure is estimated using a new econometric approach developed first by kao and chiang advances in econometrics 15 179 222 2000 time series properties of selected social expenditure in 18 oecd countries from 1981 to 1998 are examined using panel data cointegration tests and ols fmols and dols estimators results were found which differ from previous analyses reporting substantially higher income elasticities with the fmols selected social expenditure has income elasticities smaller than one but greater than one with the dols it is noteworthy that whether selected social expenditure is stationary or nonstationary may have critical implications for researchers and policy makers desiring to model and explain the impact of this expenditure on a country economic system

rational adaptive and learning behavior of voters evidence from disaggregated popularity functions for sweden the disaggregated study confirms earlier aggregated studies showing that unemployment strongly affects the popularity of the swedish government the results presented here however suggest that there are differences among popularity functions estimated across groups differing in age income and gender consequently popularity functions estimated at an aggregated level ignore reaction patterns within various groups in society

is health care really a luxury much of the work which has led to a widely held view that the income elasticity of health care spending exceeds one has been based on international cross section data or on pooled cross sections and time series in this paper we re examine this view in the context of long run equilibrium relationships between non stationary time series possibly including autonomous trends our results cast doubt upon the usefulness of pooling and upon the notion of an elasticity above one

rational expectations and macroeconomic forecasts the article presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a collection of time series of quarterly multiperiod forecasts for six variables including real gnp growth inflation and unemployment the analysis covers responses by 79 frequent participants in economic outlook surveys conducted regularly since 1968 it shows much greater incidence of apparently systematic errors for inflation than for the other variables also the tests are more favorable to composite group forecasts than to most of the individual forecast sets

disentangling the heterogeneous income elasticity and dynamics of health expenditure in this article we empirically study the impact of per capita income on health care expenditure and its dynamics over time in a sample of 14 oecd countries for the period 1971 to 2009 a simple model built upon one developed by newhouse 1977 suggests that health care is a necessity in the short run but it cannot be rejected to be a luxury good in the long run our findings provide strong empirical evidence that a year s health expenditure is conditioned by the previous one interestingly our results reveal increasing income inelasticity over time along with huge heterogeneity across countries finally this article supports the hypothesis of conditional convergence in health care spending among countries in designing policies which facilitate the sustainability of national health systems we emphasize that ceteris paribus the greater the participation of public health the lower the growth rate of health spending high share of children and elderly over working age population opposite influences w

household production of health investment analysis and applications michael grossman s health investment model provides significant insights into allocations between both leisure and income and health and nonhealth goods our geometric extension i integrates labor leisure choice with the consumer s production of both health and nonhealth goods and ii distinguishes between medical expenditures and healthcare investment this provides a framework for examining the effects of changes in incomes and wages alternative insurance arrangements including managed care travel times waiting times and schooling observed differences between the income elasticities for health goods and health investment can be resolved through relative resource intensities in the production of health and nonhealth goods

comparing french and us hospital technologies a directional input distance function approach french and us hospital technologies are compared using directional input distance functions the aggregation properties of the directional distance function allow comparison of hospital industry level performance as well as standard firm level performance with regard to productive efficiency in addition the underlying constituents of efficiency in the short run congestion and technical inefficiency and in the long run scale inefficiency are analysed by decomposing the overall measure by virtue of using the directional distance function it is also possible to obtain an estimate of a lower bound on allocative inefficiency it is found that french and us hospitals use quite different technologies long run scale inefficiencies cause most of the french hospitals inefficiency while short run technical inefficiency is the main source of overall productive inefficiency in the us hospitals

granger causality between total expenditure on health and gdp in oecd evidence from the toda yamamoto approach abstract in this paper a modified version of the granger causality test proposed by toda and yamamoto is used to investigate causality between gdp and healthcare expenditure in oecd countries the findings indicate that bidirectional granger causality is predominant

an econometric analysis of health care expenditure a cross section study of the oecd countries this paper is an empirical examination of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure the paper presents a systematic analysis of relationships across 19 oecd countries showing the effects of aggregate income institutional and socio demographic factors on health care expenditure the results indicate that institutional factors of the health systems in addition to per capita gross domestic product gdp contribute significantly to the explanation of the health care expenditure variation between countries for example the way physicians in outpatient care are paid and the mixture of public private funding and inpatient outpatient care

a panel project on purchasing power parity mean reversion within and between countries abstract previous time series studies have shown evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates deviations from purchasing power parity ppp appear to have half lives of approximately four years however the long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies and are potentially inappropriate because of regime changes in this study we re examine deviations from ppp using a panel of 150 countries and 45 annual post wwii observations our panel shows strong evidence of mean reversion that is similar to that from long time series ppp deviations are eroded at a rate of approximately 15 annually i e their half life is around four years such findings can be masked in time series data but are relatively easy to find in cross sections

on the determination of the us aggregate health care expenditure per capita real health care expenditure is examined against three major groups of explanatory variables economic demographic and health stock and it is found that the three groups of variables have an impact on real health care spending other subcategories such as real private and government health care pharmaceutical dental home nursing ambulatory personal medical consumption and in patient expenditures have also been examined and have been found to be affected by the explanatory variables for several subcomponents there is evidence of supplier inducement of the demographic group of variables the ageing population had an impact only on the per capita real overall and private health care outlay and pharmaceutical spending also cointegrating relationships were found and consistent estimators of the elasticities found

formation of rationally heterogeneous expectations this paper models expectation formation by taking into account that agents may produce heterogeneous expectations because of informational frictions and differing levels of a capacity to process information we show that there are two general classes of steady states within this framework those where strictly dominated forecasting rules vanish and those heterogeneous states where a positive proportion of agents uses a more costly perfect foresight we demonstrate that intrinsic heterogeneity can also arise in a model where the forecasting rules are not equally costly and do not exhibit identical performance in the long run

individual rational and group rational inflation expectations theory and cross section evidence abstract a distinction is drawn between individual rational and group rational inflation expectations survey data for israel show that individual inflation expectations are influenced by socioeconomic and psychological variables specifically interpersonal trust age and income

population and income is there a puzzle abstract this note presents wide evidence on the relationship between population and income for 125 countries for which data was available for the period 1950 2000 the main result is that there is a weak but negative relationship between population growth and per capita gdp as income increases population expands at a slower rate this relationship appears to be stronger for african countries and for asian countries before 1970

comment on m bruno theoretical developments in the light of macroeconomic policy and empirical research the paper by michael bruno is a very interesting and thought provoking survey of the key new likely desirable developments in macroeconomics as seen by a distinguished economist and policymaker i like and agree with most of bruno s arguments and assessments so all i will do is add three further reflections on points in his paper this is a comment in a volume dealing with no less than the development of macroeconomics therefore i have chosen to discuss grand subjects where all i can do is outline the problems and leave the answers to the reader let me begin with bruno s comments on the re emergence of the pricewage spiral in economic theory the importance of the cola the importance of external price rises etc broadly speaking these remarks deal with the importance of institutions for the dynamics of prices and wages i think these remarks are part of a complex something we all should have faced long ago maybe we academic economists have been led astray by analytical convenience into almost universal acceptance of a belief that we should never have accepted without solid empirical support even if it

the normative economics of health care finance and provision whereas in many countries the crisis in medical care has been seen in terms of excess spending on health services in the uk it has been seen at least by most of those who manage and work in the nhs as a crisis of underfunding this has come about as the result of the government s successful attempts to restrain the rate of growth of real spending on the nhs which in turn reflects the government s belief that its principal effective weapon against what it perceives to be inefficiency in the nhs is to challenge management itself reformed and to some extent liberated by systematic financial squeezes the same concern has given rise to a host of proposals for reform of the nhs most of which involve a much greater role for private insurance private finance of other kinds such as out of pocket payments and private provision of health care itself

the determinants and effects of health expenditure in developed countries previous studies of international differences in health spending have been restricted to the use of relatively small samples of cross sectional data our objective here is to re examine the results of previous work using a sample of 560 pooled time series and cross section observations results confirm the importance of gdp as a determinant of health spending with an estimated income elasticity at or around unity but also suggest that oecd countries should not be regarded as a single homogeneous group the importance of some non income variables is also confirmed although the direct effect of these factors appears to be small

public financing of health expenditures insurance and health outcomes the effects of public financing of health expenditures insurance coverage and other factors on health outcomes are examined within health production models estimated using 1960 1992 data across 20 oecd countries mortality rates are found to depend on the mix of health care expenditures and the type of health insurance coverage increases in the publicly financed share of health expenditures are associated with increases in mortality rates increases in inpatient and ambulatory insurance coverage are associated with reduced mortality the effects of gdp health expenditures and age structure on mortality are similar to those in previous studies tobacco use alcohol use fat consumption female labour force participation and education levels are also significantly related to overall mortality rates increases in income inequality are associated with lower mortality rates suggesting that the negative relationship between inequality and health outcomes suggested by some previous studies does not remain w

what do economists know an empirical study of experts expectations for more than three decades economic columnist joseph a livingston has canvassed a panel of economists twice a year eliciting their six month and twelve month forecasts for more than a dozen key variables this study analyzes whether the experts predictions are unbiased and whether complete use was made of all relevant known information unbiasedness and completeness being necessary conditions for fully rational expectations little bias was found in either the half year or full year predictions but extensive underutilization of information particularly data on monetary growth occurred to prophecy is extremely difficult especially with respect to the future chinese proverb do economists expectations regarding key price and nonprice variables utilize all known relevant information in an unbiased efficient manner this is a worthy subject for research for several reasons properties of experts predictions likely form an upper bound for those of laymen further as john muth 14 has noted the character of dynamic processes is typically very sensitive to the way expectations are influenced by the actual course of events p 316 hence we need to know precisely how events do affect expectations finally the common practice of replacing a variable s generally unobserved expectation with a proxy based on its past values will be unbiased and will not cause bias in other

are perceptions of inflation rational some evidence for sweden this survey paper argues that walrasian markets and monetary exchan ge are alternative not complementary arrangements for coordinating economic activity that if one realizes this many informational anomalies and price rigidities that appear irrational in a walrasia n context can be understood as the outcome of maximizing behavior in a monetary economy and that the precautionary approach to modelin g the demand for money takes on a particular importance in this way of looking at things empirical evidence on the demand for money is cite d in support of this point of view which tends to reinstate the quantity of money as an important economic variable in contrast to the new classical vision of the economy whi ch downgrades money s importance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

information induced heteroscedasticity in price expectations data this study tests the hypothesis that price expectations differ across individuals because they acquire different information about inflation if price information is a normal good then the amount of price information acquired will vary across individuals according to income education and other demand specific variables causing price expectations to be heteroscedastic with respect to these variables utilizing monthly household survey data the authors test the heteroscedasticity hypothesis and find support for the differential information model in addition they develop a novel method of incorporating the don t know response to questions about inflation into the estimation of price expectations copyright 1990 by mit press

health care is an individual necessity and a national luxury applying multilevel decision models to the analysis of health care expenditures health care is neither a necessity or a luxury it is both since the income elasticity varies with the level of analysis with insurance individual income elasticities are typically near zero while national health expenditure elasticities are commonly greater than 1 0 the debate over whether health care is or is not a luxury good arises primarily from the failure to specify levels of analysis clearly so as to distinguish variation within groups from variation between groups apparently contradictory empirical results are shown to be consistent with a simple nested multilevel model of health care spending

stationarity of health expenditures and gdp evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks this paper re examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and gdp in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 oecd countries over the period from 1960 to 1997 previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust we advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel lm unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts in contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series