state abortion legislation as a public good before and after roe v wade utilization of a theoretical model of the public demand for abortion legislation suggests that should the 1973 roe vs wade ruling be overturned the availability of abortion in the us would not be as limited as it was before this landmark decision the model conceptualized public demand for abortion as a combination of 2 factors 1 external demand measured by voter preference and reflecting the external costs or benefits conferred on the public by the relative availability of abortion and 2 private demand based on the direct effect of abortion access by women of childbearing age the type of abortion legislation in each state prior to roe vs wade prohibited except to save the mothers life or in cases of rape restricted to specific situations such as preserving the mothers health and unrestricted was used as an indicator of public sentiment toward abortion among the factors considered to correlate with sentiment toward abortion availability were income education marital status race and religious affiliation the model predicts that 20 states compared to 30 in 1970 would prohibit abortion and 8 compared to 4 in 1970 would place no restrictions on abortion if each state were to select its own abortion policy omission of the private demand component from the model resulted in even less restrictive access to abortion 11 states with an abortion ban and 11 with unrestricted access these findings are consistent with the national opinion polls indicating support for less restrictive abortion legislation

provider availability race and abortion demand variations in the availability of abortion providers may impact the demand for abortions since greater provider availability reduces the travel cost associated with obtaining an abortion this paper applies a fertility control model to estimate the responsiveness of abortion demand to travel cost variations using individual data from all births and abortions of women over age 20 in the state of texas for 1993 the probability that a pregnant woman chooses an abortion appears to be sensitive to availability induced variations in the travel cost of abortion services controlling for the endogeneity of travel distance the results suggest that pregnant women who reside in counties with longer travel distances to the nearest abortion provider have lower probabilities of aborting their pregnancies than women in counties closer to abortion providers simulations show that changes in travel distance will have relatively large impacts on overall abortion rates and furthermore that these effects vary across race in addition these simulations show substantial differences by race in the effects of changes in other explanatory variables

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

regulation and the optimal size and type of abortion provider between 1973 the year the supreme court ruled in roe v wade that women have the right to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies and 1982 the number of abortion providers increased by 81 per cent however between 1982 and 1992 a period of increasing state level abortion regulation the number of abortion providers decreased by 18 per cent we know very little about the factors that influence the willingness and ability of hospitals clinics and physicians to provide abortion services over time based on state data from 1978 to 1992 the results of this paper suggest that large abortion providers are better able to compete and survive in the market also clinics and physicians offices appear to be gaining market share relative to hospitals further this paper includes analysis of the impact of state level medicaid funding regulations on the number size and type of abortion provider these results have important implications for women s access to abortion services and thus have impor

innovation waves self organized criticality and technological convergence abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolutionary process of imitation and innovation as a process of searching in a given neighbourhood of firms the spreading of information through neighbourhoods allows firms to acquire knowledge leading to innovation waves followed by imitation as firms attempt to glean information on best practise techniques whilst innovators are temporarily allowed to reap quasi rents the imitative band wagon effect drives the profit rate down to its normal level productivity growth lowers the prices of sectors involved in the process of technological advance causing obsolescence and creative destruction in a schumpeterian sense

can beer taxes affect teen pregnancy evidence based on teen abortion rates and birth rates economists have investigated the effects of increased alcohol taxes on various alcohol related phenomena like traffic fatalities but to my knowledge this study is the first to investigate the effects of beer taxes on teen pregnancy outcomes namely abortion and birth rates the study employs statelevel data for 15 19 year old women for the years 1985 1988 1992 and 1996 the smallness of the panel imposes some constraints on the statistical methods used results indicate that higher beer taxes have statistically significant negative effects on teen abortion rates though the magnitudes of the effects are quite small effects on birthrates are statistically insignificant this suggests that increased beer taxes may help prevent some unwanted pregnancies that would typically be terminated via abortions rather than culminating in live births however the small magnitudes of the effects strongly caution against relying on increased beer taxes to noticeably reduce teen pregnancy rates

the fertility effect of dependent tax exemptions estimates for the united states the effect of the dependent tax exemption on the fertility rate in the united states is estimated the estimation is an improvement on previous work in that a non linear specification is used to better capture the shape of the demand for children it is found that the marginal effect of the dependent exemption decreases with the level of the exemption this suggests that although subsidies for childbearing will increase fertility it becomes increasingly difficult for countries to increase fertility through this type of scheme

demand for and regulation of cardiac services centralization of cardiac services can increase hospital surgery volumes and decrease access for patients this study estimates the effects of changes in the regulation of cardiac services on treatments mortality and utility demand for surgery services by heart attack victims who form expectations of the need for and productivity of surgery in their choice of hospital and treatment is estimated the results indicate that mortality and ex ante utility are insensitive to moderate changes in policy changes in surgery volume and travel costs offset one another despite similar health outcomes the competing policies have different implications for taxpayers

state abortion rates the impact of policies providers politics demographics and economic environment abstract this paper uses data on abortion rates by state from 1974 1988 to estimate two stage least squares models with fixed state and year effects restrictions on medicaid funding for abortion are correlated with lower abortion rates in state and higher rates among nearby states a maximal estimate suggests that 19 25 of the abortions among low income women that are publicly funded do not take place after funding is eliminated parental notification laws for teen abortions do not significantly affect aggregate abortion rates a larger number of abortion providers in a state increases the abortion rate primarily through inducing cross state travel

innovation and growth through local and global interaction this paper investigates the research and development activity of heterogeneous and rationally bounded firms the latter conduct this activity through in house research and by collecting information originating in other firms spillovers thus research and development activity owes both to independent searching and to interaction diffusing information we study the conditions under which this idiosyncratic effort yields effects that have either local system wise negligible impacts or cumulate to generate significant aggregate ones in the latter case global effects feed back upon the incentive to innovate and therefore on the strength of local interaction as well as on autonomous research efforts it is these dynamic forces that we model we compare cases in which significant aggregate effects do emerge with cases in which they do not and study their outcome on innovation directed investment and on long term growth

assessing competition in hospital care markets the importance of accounting for quality differentiation quality differentiation is especially important in the hospital industry where the choices of medicare patients are unaffected by prices unlike previous studies that use geographic market concentration to estimate hospital competitiveness this article emphasizes the importance of quality differentiation in this spatially differentiated market i estimate a random coefficients discrete choice model that predicts patient flow to different hospitals and find that demand responses to both distance and quality are substantial the estimates suggest that patients do not substitute toward alternative hospitals in proportion to current market shares implying that geographic market concentration is an inappropriate measure of hospital competitiveness

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

an economic analysis of the demand for abortions research in estimating the demand for abortions is conducted by using an economic model and examining socioeconomic factors some suggest that a households fertility control decision is decided by a comparison of the costs and benefits of an additional child over a period of time therefore abortion is a choice related to the interaction of preference cost and income a womans marital status is another factor in the abortion decision an unmarried women may having a greater demand for abortion since the demands on her are greater another factor is a womans employment status an employed woman more likely having a higher abortion religious affiliation may be another determinant in lower demand for abortion since most religions oppose abortion however in surveys of catholic women 74 believed that a woman less than 3 months pregnant should make her own choice on abortion educational status was also thought to effect abortion demand but results showed no significance if the laws were changed abortion were illegal and the price increased 50 the abortion rate would drop by 40 5 the prohibiting of government funding for abortions would cause a 17 5 decrease future trends in abortion are likely to increase however due to the declining marriage rates and increased divorce rate other factors that will effect these trends include sexual behavior patterns contraceptive availability and the perceived risks involved in birth control

regulation imperfect competition and the u s abortion market the u s abortion market has grown increasingly concentrated recently while many states tightened abortion laws using data on abortion providers i estimate an equilibrium model of demand price competition entry and exit to capture the effect of regulation on industry dynamics estimates show regulations played an important role in determining the abortion market structure and evolution counterfactual simulations reveal increases in demand aimed regulation were the most important observed factor in explaining recent abortion declines simulating utah s regulatory regime nationally shows tightening abortion restrictions can increase abortions in equilibrium mainly through tilting the competitive landscape toward low price providers

self organized criticality in a dynamic game we investigate conditions under which self organized criticality soc arises in a version of a dynamic entry game in the simplest version of the game there is a single location a pool and one agent is exogenously dropped into the pool every period payoffs to entrants are positive as long as the number of agents in the pool is below a critical level if an agent chooses to exit he cannot re enter resulting in a future payoff of zero agents in the pool decide simultaneously each period whether to stay in or not we characterize the symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium of the resulting dynamic game we then introduce local interactions between agents that occupy neighboring pools and demonstrate that under our payoff structure local interaction effects are necessary and sufficient for soc and for an associated power law to emerge thus we provide an explicit game theoretic model of the mechanism through which soc can arise in a social context with forward looking agents

the effect of medicaid abortion funding restrictions on abortions pregnancies and births this paper considers whether state medicaid abortion funding restrictions affect the likelihood of getting pregnant having an abortion and bearing a child we exploit a natural experiment afforded by supreme court decisions and employ more traditional multivariate models with alternative fixed effect specifications an analysis of 12 years of state level data indicate that restrictions are associated with a reduction in abortions and either no change or a reduction in births implying fewer pregnancies subsequent analysis of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy is consistent with these findings and show the response is concentrated among the low income population

schumpeterian dynamics part ii technological progress firm growth and economic selection abstract business firms strive for survival and growth they innovate in order to grow they imitate in order to survive the purpose of this paper the second in the series on schumpeterian dynamics is to construct a simple mathematical model which is capable of studying the evolution of an industry s state of technology as a dynamic outcome of the interactions among innovation imitation and capacity growth at the micro level of firms the doctrine of economic selection insists by means of the analogy to the biological theory of natural selection that only the most efficient firms will survive the long run competitive struggle for capacity growth indeed if neither innovation nor imitation is possible for the firm a firm or a group of firms which is lucky enough to start with the most efficient technology will outgrow all the other firms in the long run once however the possibility of technological imitation is allowed for the firms the industry will settle down to a static equilibrium of perfect technological knowledge not by the success of the most efficient firms in their striving for the higher growth rate but by the success of the less efficient in their effort to imitate the others the blind force of economic selection is thus outwitted by the human force of imitative activities finally when firms are allowed to innovate in their technology the selective force of market competition is no longer capable of weeding out the less fit even in the long run indeed it is shown in the present paper that the dynamic interplay of the processes of innovation imitation and growth will keep the industry s state of technology from settling down to the static equilibrium but reproduce in the long run a relative dispersion of efficiencies across firms in a statistically balanced form

the supply of infants relinquished for adoption did access to abortion make a difference motivated by a theory of desired fertility i use three years of aggregate state level data to examine the impact of abortion access on the supply of infants relinquished for adoption i show evidence that abortion access affected the supply of infants relinquished during the 1980s in two different ways first the availability of abortion providers has the expected effect of reducing the supply of infants relinquished particularly relative to the demand for abortion second abortion law has an unexpected negative effect this suggests that as abortion laws become more restrictive the total number of unwanted births may decrease jel j13

estimating the factors determining the demand for induced abortions among married women in taiwan this paper purports to estimate the characteristics of women who had experiences of abortion in 1991 based on an economic model of fertility the study makes use of a national survey on the knowledge of attitude towards and practice of family planning and reproductive health among married women in taiwan the results show that older women with higher family income and who live in urban areas were more likely to have the pregnancy terminated in addition the decision to have an abortion was negatively correlated with prior pregnancy loss but positively associated with the number of previous live births on the other hand the availability of abortion services as measured by the number of legal abortion providers at city and county levels had a negative effect on the demand for abortions the local female unemployment rate was found to be positively correlated with the woman s decision to have an abortion

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

the impact of state abortion restrictions on minors demand for abortions this study uses a weighted least squares model and a fixed effects model to estimate the impact of parental consent laws and laws governing medicaid funding of abortions on the adolescents demand for abortion in the united states during 1978 90 the focus is on adolescent pregnancy because 12 of total legal abortions in 1987 were to adolescents aged under 18 years the rate of abortion and types of abortion law range widely between states data are obtained from the us center for disease control on reported abortions from the naral foundation on the dates of actual enforcement restrictions and from the alan guttmacher institute on abortion providers the empirical model is based on a model developed by grossman and joyce proxy measures are used to represent abortion sentiment fixed effects models indicated that there was a decline of 13 17 in adolescents demand for abortion in states with enforced parental involvement laws compared to states without enforced laws the results implied a 9 15 decline in adolescents demand for abortion in states that restricted medicaid funding of abortion compared to states that did not there was a positive association between abortion demand and income and between abortion demand and the availability of abortion providers the inclusion of the abortion sentiment proxies did not change the signs and magnitudes of the impact very much in the fixed effects models it is posited that the negative impacts of abortion restrictions on adolescent abortion demand cannot be attributed to unobserved heterogeneity four methods of modeling are used to account for the potential role of unobserved heterogeneity