energy security in asean a quantitative approach for sustainable energy policy abstract we investigate energy security of the association of southeast asian nations asean under the 4 a s framework the asean economic community aec agreement launched in 2015 renewed a regional focus on energy security and sustainability we employ an analytic framework to quantitatively assess progress in different categories including availability acceptability affordability and applicability key metrics include the documentation of co 2 emissions energy access measures and energy supply reserves from 2005 2010 we identify relevant energy indicators using high quality historical data from the iea and world bank we find that asean made little progress toward establishing energy security in the previous five year planning period 2005 2010 as it regressed in most categories except applicability therefore we suggest that increased development of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies would move asean in a positive direction toward achieving energy security and sustainable energy policy goals

effects of universal health insurance on health care utilization and supply side responses evidence from japan abstract we investigate the effects of a massive expansion in health insurance coverage on health care utilization and supply side responses by focusing on universal health insurance introduced in japan in 1961 there are two major findings first health care utilization measured in terms of admissions inpatient days and outpatient visits to hospitals increased significantly second we also find a supply response but the size of the supply response differs across service types while the number of beds increases effects on the number of medical institutions physicians and nurses are either negligible or inconclusive our results suggest that countries planning a large expansion in health insurance coverage would need to generate sufficient financial resources to cover the surge in health care expenditures both in the short and long run our results also indicate that any slowdown in the supply side response may constrain the ability of the health care system to meet increased demand

mandate based health reform and the labor market evidence from the massachusetts reform we model the labor market impact of the key provisions of the national and massachusetts mandate based health reforms individual mandates employer mandates and subsidies we characterize the compensating differential for employer sponsored health insurance eshi and the welfare impact of reform in terms of sufficient statistics we compare welfare under mandate based reform to welfare in a counterfactual world where individuals do not value eshi relying on the massachusetts reform we find that jobs with eshi pay 2812 less annually somewhat less than the cost of eshi to employers accordingly the deadweight loss of mandate based health reform was approximately 8 percent of its potential size

the sraffian methodenstreit and the revolution in economic theory here i address several questions raised by ajit sinha s book a revolution in economic theory the economics of piero sraffa i focus on the contribution brought by the book and the way in which it is positioned against other contributions especially in what concerns the methodology presupposed in sraffa s contribution within what can be termed a sraffian methodenstreit given the role of theory and history in the controversies surrounding sraffian analysis in so doing i address the geometrical approach advanced by sraffa which is emphasised by sinha in his critique of interpretations of sraffa drawing on the notion of equilibrium i also address the connections between sraffa and ludwig wittgenstein which are discussed by sinha taking into special consideration what wittgenstein saw as sraffa s ethnological or anthropological approach and its implications for the use of sraffa s methodology in economics

sraffa and his arguments against marginism the subtitle of sraffa s most celebrated work production of commodities by means of commodities is prelude to a critique of economic theory given that no later work was ever published by sraffa we are left to wonder what would have come after the prelude this paper suggests that the core of the critique might have been the marginal method itself by carefully distinguishing between published and unpublished work we shows that sraffa s opposition to the marginal method follows several threads some of which were developed over a period of nearly 35 years such as the belief that economic theory should use only measurable and observable magnitudes the critique of the fundamental symmetry between production and consumption and the disagreement with the marshallian concept of equilibrium although none of the arguments reached a stage that sraffa considered satisfactory enough to be worth publishing our reconstruction sheds light on his research programme and on otherwise rather obscure passages in his works

how product standardization affects choice evidence from the massachusetts health insurance exchange this paper examines the effect of choice architecture on massachusetts health insurance exchange a policy change standardized cost sharing parameters of plans across insurers and altered information presentation post change consumers chose more generous plans and different brands but were not more price sensitive we use a discrete choice model that allows the policy to affect how attributes are valued to decompose the policy s effects into a valuation effect and a product availability effect the brand shifts are largely explained by the availability effect and the generosity shift by the valuation effect a hypothetical choice experiment replicates our results and explores alternative counterfactuals

piero sraffa s early views on classical political economy the present paper outlines the building blocks for a reconstruction of piero sraffa s early views on classical political economy besides discussing some of the basic conjectures for a plausible reconstruction in the context of the current debate on the issues involved the paper focuses on evidence gathered from a selection of documents concerning the preparation of sraffa s lectures on value delivered in the second half of the 1920s whilst full discussion of sraffa s early scientific and intellectual development would fall outside the scope of this paper the treatment directs the reader s attention to some elements of potential interest and it supports the interpretation advanced by pasinetti it is hoped that the present analysis will contribute to a discussion on new perspectives concerning the scientific work of piero sraffa copyright oxford university press

a sraffian critique of the classical notion of centre of gravitation in this paper we use insights from sraffa s classic production of commodities by means of commodities to argue that the classical notion of centre of gravitation is not a sound concept the market mechanics of labour allocation through price signals and quantity adjustments given effectual demands do not lead to a centre of gravitation we work out all such possible market mechanisms including the specific classical case and show that the centre of gravitation is a non attractive point in all cases copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

does public insurance crowd out private insurance the cost of expanding public sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage we estimate the extent of crowd out arising from the expansions of medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987 1992 period we estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage this occurred largely because employees took up employer based insurance less frequently there is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents

income distribution and the size of the financial sector a sraffian analysis the recent expansion of the financial sector has been accompanied by deregulation an acceleration of financial innovation and changes in income distribution the size of these phenomena has attracted the attention of the literature a large part has analysed the relationship between financial development and inequality arguing that the former tends to reduce the latter for a review of this literature see demirguc kunt and levine 2009 it moves from the claim that perfect credit markets reduce inequality by bringing about the efficient exploitation of personal qualities material endowments and the growth potentials of the economy credit market imperfections hold back the achievement of these results but are counteracted by deregulation and financial innovation which tend to eliminate rent positions

oil vulnerability index of oil importing countries abstract this paper assesses the relative oil vulnerability of 26 net oil importing countries for the year 2004 on the basis of various indicators the ratio of value of oil imports to gross domestic product gdp oil consumption per unit of gdp gdp per capita and oil share in total energy supply ratio of domestic reserves to oil consumption exposure to geopolitical oil market concentration risks as measured by net oil import dependence diversification of supply sources political risk in oil supplying countries and market liquidity the approach using the principal component technique has been adopted to combine these individual indicators into a composite index of oil vulnerability such an index captures the relative sensitivity of various economies towards developments of the international oil market with a higher index indicating higher vulnerability the results show that there are considerable differences in the values of individual indicators of oil vulnerability and overall oil vulnerability index among the countries both inter and intraregional

micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes we build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work we find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work moreover we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers in our model micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated our model is also consistent with other cross country patterns

an unproductive labour view of finance the present paper discusses the role of the financial sector in a capitalist economy arguing that the huge increase in its weight economic and otherwise in the last decades is not justified by the importance of its contribution to economic growth the point is developed going back to the classical concepts of productive and unproductive labour there are two dimensions of these concepts that we discuss the first links the social efficiency of the financial sector to its role in the reproduction process crucially distinguishing basic from non basic uses we argue that many financial services usually seen as services to production really consist of the provision of gambling facilities and thereby have to be considered at best as luxury goods when evaluated according to its reproductive capability the service of arranging a gambling house cannot be seen as producing social value a second sense in which the discussion of productive and unproductive labour casts light on the nature of some financial services is that connected to the conception of pure circulation costs as different from costs of production proper the amount of circulation costs varies with the varying intensity of the realisation problem they are not defined by the production technique and are in this sense arbitrary copyright oxford university press

mitigating america s demographic dilemma by pre funding social security abstract financing social security benefits at current levels implies significant increases in payroll taxes within the next 20 years under current us demographic developments using a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with realistic patterns of fertility and lifespan extension this study shows that future generations would be harmed during the demographic transition due to rising payroll taxes which crowd out savings and slow real wage growth below the rate of technological progress a faster rate of technological progress would mitigate only some of the payroll tax increase and its economic consequences but could not overcome them addressing the financing problem by reducing social security benefits as needed or by raising the eligibility age for benefits imposes major welfare losses on current or near term retirees by contrast a pre funding of social security financed with consumption taxes more evenly spreads the welfare losses across generations and it helps future generations especially the poor by stimulating capital formation

a few counter factual hypotheses on the current economic crisis the economic and financial problems of the present devastating crisis are terribly practical sraffa s little book is highly theoretical to relate the two we must avoid stopping at keynes and include the whole group of economists around him in cambridge resuming the discussions that have been pushed into oblivion by the mainstream the capital theory controversy was not the only one here more relevant is the controversy on growth income distribution savings and profits between samuelson modigliani and kaldor pasinetti as a result a theorem associated with modigliani miller was brought to fame and hailed as the core of modern corporate finance its surprisingly wide acceptance is here harshly criticised and indicted of major responsibility for the present crisis inevitably this is argued through counter factual hypotheses yet even with less sophisticated analytical tools a framework does exist much nearer to common sense implying the needed flexibility and openness of mind for the major restructuring of financial institutions which today so clearly emerges as the major task to undertake copyright oxford university press

monopolistic competition when price and quality are imperfectly observable consider the symmetric equilibrium of a monopolistically competitive industry in which manufacturers select price and quality to maximize expected profit and consumers maximize utility by conducting costly search among sellers using an optimal sequential search rule consumers search among sellers because i each consumer idiosyncratically evaluates each seller s quality and ii a retailing sector generates variation in the prices consumers pay consumers are handicapped in their search because their observations of firms price and quality levels are noisy an improvement in price information is represented by an increase in the precision with which consumers observe sellers prices similarly an improvement in quality information is represented by an increase in precision with which consumers observe sellers quality levels an improvement of either type of information may increase or decrease welfare the perverse case in which improved price information decreases welfare occurs when price competition among firms becomes so intense relative to quality competition that firms select severely suboptimal levels of quality a consumer searching among monopolistically competitive sellers may have difficulty accurately observing the price and quality of each seller s product he must infer from his prior beliefs and noisy observations the true values of the product s price and quality attributes we show that increasing the precision with which consumers observe an attribute of a product makes the inference problem easier and causes the demand the seller faces with respect to that attribute to become more elastic the equilibrium level of that attribute changes accordingly and since the equilibrium levels of price and quality interact the equilibrium level of the other attribute changes as well these equilibrium effects can be perverse in two ways first if the precision of quality observation is fixed then improvement in the precision of price observation can reduce welfare the chain of causation is this increasing the precision of price observation causes price to fall the resulting smaller price cost margin induces sellers to reduce quality de

sustainable energy security for india an assessment of the energy supply sub system this paper undertakes part of the assessment of the sustainable energy security ses for india ses goes beyond energy supply and is a function of the aggregate energy system of a country including the energy demand and conversion and distribution sub system the supply sub system which consists of eight primary energy sources viz coal oil natural gas biomass hydro solar wind and nuclear has been evaluated for four dimensions of ses viz availability affordability efficiency and environmental acceptability using 16 selected metrics the dimensional indices are calculated for domestic and imported energy sources separately for the years 2002 2007 and 2012 results reveal that the ses index for oil has increased by 10 but it has decreased by 6 for gas from 2002 to 2012 while changes for other energy sources are marginal the overall supply sub system ses index is approximately 0 75 against an ideal value of 1 0 which reveal the shortfall from the desired value a sensitivity analysis reveals that the ses index is relatively robust to variation in weights the assessment provides a comprehensive way to track the performance of the energy supply sub system and can be used to design policy interventions for improving the overall ses index for india

paradoxical effects of increasing the normal retirement age a prospective evaluation abstract a life cycle model that incorporates both disability insurance di and old age insurance oai is developed to study social security reforms and is compared to an alternative model without di the model with di predicts that increasing the normal retirement age nra causes a decrease in employment and an increase in di receipt and that the decrease of payroll tax revenue and the increase of di expenses combined offset about 40 of the decrease of oai expenses these paradoxical effects of increasing the nra are absent from the model without di i employ both models to search for reforms that will balance the government budget in an economy with an aging population which has the demographics for the year 2100 and find that the required change in tax and benefit rules differ substantially across the two models

health insurance and self employment evidence from massachusetts previous studies have found that health insurance is an important component of workers labor market decisions in this article the author studies the effect of health insurance availability and p

wealth inequality and intergenerational links previous work has had difficulty generating household saving behaviour that makes the distribution of wealth much more concentrated than that of labour earnings and that makes the richest households hold onto large amounts of wealth even during very old age i construct a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping generations model in which parents and children are linked by accidental and voluntary bequests and by earnings ability i show that voluntary bequests can explain the emergence of large estates while accidental bequests alone cannot and that adding earnings persistence within families increases wealth concentration even more i also show that the introduction of a bequest motive generates lifetime savings profiles more consistent with the data

the cyclical and secular behaviour of the labour input comparing efficiency units and hours worked summary a monthly labour input series designed to correct for the fact that all hours worked are not of the same quality is constructed and its properties compared with unadjusted hours worked this efficiency units series is constructed from bls data on hours worked and earnings by age and sex the cyclical fluctuations displayed by the efficiency units series are smaller on average than those displayed by hours worked although the difference is not large however the secular behaviour of the series is quite different hours worked per capita displays a significant positive trend while efficiency units per capita does not

corporate limited liability and cambridge economics in the inter war period robertson keynes and sraffa this article investigates the contribution of three well known cambridge economists dennis robertson john maynard keynes and piero sraffa to the analysis of limited corporate liability in relation to the separation of ownership from control the paper argues that although as is to be expected these economists develop different approaches and overall conclusions on the issue of corporate limited liability and the separation of ownership from control their interpretations converge nevertheless on important points put differently robertson keynes and sraffa raised the same micro and macro economic issues but came up with different answers their shared concerns as well as their varied answers display an undeniable modernity and thus remain very relevant to contemporary considerations on firm governance especially in the context of the present global economic crisis

estimating the tradeoff between risk protection and moral hazard with a nonlinear budget set model of health insurance insurance induces a tradeoff between the welfare gains from risk protection and the welfare losses from moral hazard empirical work traditionally estimates each side of the tradeoff separately potentially yielding mutually inconsistent results i develop a nonlinear budget set model of health insurance that allows for both simultaneously nonlinearities in the budget set arise from deductibles coinsurance rates and stoplosses that alter moral hazard as well as risk protection i illustrate the properties of my model by estimating it using data on employer sponsored health insurance from a large firm

assessing the energy vulnerability case of industrialised countries the emergence of new big consumer countries on the energy markets and the perspective of oil and gas depletion at the end of the current century raise the concerns about fair distribution of the remaining resources for the common and sustainable wellbeing of the mankind high volatility of energy prices discourages the investment and delays the energy technology transition voluntary measures are needed mainly in industrialised countries in order to develop alternative and sustainable energy sources to enable technology transfer towards emerging and developing countries and to avoid struggle for energy procurement in this paper a composite index of energy demand supply weaknesses is defined as a proxy of energy vulnerability the proposed index is based on several indicators such as energy intensity oil and gas import dependency co2 content of primary energy supply electricity supply weaknesses and non diversity in transport fuels the assessment of this composite index for selected industrialised countries is discussed as well as the sensitivity to various factors

the effect of expanding medicaid eligibility on supplemental security income program participation abstract low income adults without dependent children have historically had few paths to obtain public health insurance unless they qualified for supplemental security income ssi cash benefits because of a disability however in states that expand their medicaid programs childless adults may obtain medicaid without undergoing an intensive ssi disability review process and with substantially higher income and assets than the ssi program allows this expanded availability of medicaid coverage independent of ssi participation creates an opportunity to increase earnings and savings without jeopardizing health insurance coverage in this paper we use the natural experiments created by state decisions to expand medicaid to nondisabled nonelderly adults without dependent children to study the effect of decoupling medicaid eligibility and cash assistance using a difference in differences study design we collected data on the income eligibility limits enrollment caps and coverage characteristics of state medicaid expansions to childless adults from 2001 to 2013 we combine these data with the nationally representative american community survey to estimate the effects of state expansion on ssi participation we find relative declines in ssi participation of 0 17 percentage points on average after the introduction of medicaid coverage for childless adults a 7 relative decrease this finding suggests the potential for small but important efficiency gains from separating ssi and medicaid eligibility

the rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment between 1984 and 2001 the share of nonelderly adults receiving social security disability insurance income di rose by 60 percent to 5 3 million beneficiaries rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency declining demand for less skilled workers and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate we estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984 lowering measured u s unemployment by one half a percentage point steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of di receipt

listen to sraffa s silences a new interpretation of sraffa s production of commodities this paper argues that the received interpretation of sraffa s prices as classical natural prices that would prevail when the system is at the centre of gravitation cannot be retained it offers an alternative interpretation in which sraffa s prices are completely independent of demand considerations or the condition of equilibrium of demand and supply the requirement of the uniform rate of profits in sraffa s price equations is argued to be a logical consequence of the assumption that wages are uniform and fixed from outside the system the paper provides evidence from sraffa s published and unpublished writings to buttress its new interpretation it also provides answers to the major criticisms and questions raised against the new interpretation copyright oxford university press

physician payments under health care reform abstract this study examines the impact of major health insurance reform on payments made in the health care sector we study the prices of services paid to physicians in the privately insured market during the massachusetts health care reform the reform increased the number of insured individuals as well as introduced an online marketplace where insurers compete we estimate that over the reform period physician payments increased at least 11 percentage points relative to control areas payment increases began around the time legislation passed the house and senate the period in which their was a high probability of the bill eventually becoming law this result is consistent with fixed duration payment contracts being negotiated in anticipation of future demand and competition

the minimum wage and di claims abstract this article examines the impact of the minimum wage on di claims based on a state year panel for 2002 2017 constructed from the social security administration s state agencies monthly workload mowl dataset across a wide variety of specifications the minimum wage has had no discernable short run effect on di claims

insurance induced moral hazard a dynamic model of within year medical care decision making under uncertainty health insurance may lead individuals to overconsume medical care many studies explore this moral hazard using models that aggregate medical care decisions up to the annual level using employer employee matched data from the medical expenditure panel survey meps i estimate moral hazard using a dynamic model of within year medical care consumption that allows for endogenous health transitions variation in medical care prices and individual uncertainty within a health insurance year i then estimate moral hazard under a second set of conditions that are consistent with the assumptions of most annual decision making models the within year decision making model produces a moral hazard estimate that is 19 2 larger than the alternative model i highlight the importance of controlling for within year dynamics in a model of medical care consumption using a counterfactual policy simulation that implements the individual mandate provision of the 2010 patient protection and aordable care act i nd that full implementation of the policy decreases the percentage of uninsured individuals in the population being analyzed from 11 8 to 6 0 furthermore when all uninsured individuals are forced into coverage their predicted annual medical care expenditure increases by 45 5

order process and morphology sraffa and wittgenstein this contribution is based on an exploration of the nature and meaning of some of sraffa s and wittgenstein s mutual ontological methodological and philosophical influences whose initial findings are set out in arena 2013 the article has two core objectives first i argue that based on earlier findings a different interpretation of sraffa s contribution to economics is possible from those that have been predominant so far and that hold that sraffa s approach is primarily a contribution to the theory of relative prices i consider the two main interpretations of sraffa s price system in this regard whilst these differ in important aspects i argue that they share a core feature namely an approach to prices based on the concept of economic or social order understood as a final outcome independent of the possible process through which this outcome can be achieved second i am interested in highlighting a number of connections between wittgenstein s works post tractatus and certain developments contained in sraffa s unpublished papers taking wittgenstein post tractatus as the starting point i proceed to argue that core concepts employed by wittgenstein are compatible with and reinforce an interpretation of sraffa s contribution in terms of a morphological and comparative analysis of the economic foundations of surplus based societies from this perspective the notions of surveyable representation and snapshot are employed to characterise an analysis in which agents are guided by social rules and the concept of mechanical causality is discarded this convergence of sraffa s and wittgenstein s approaches does not however exclude differences concerning the social facts investigated and the use of analytical tools such as mathematics

estimating marginal returns to medical care evidence from at risk newborns a key policy question is whether the benefits of additional medical expenditures exceed their costs we propose a new approach for estimating marginal returns to medical spending based on variation in medical inputs generated by diagnostic thresholds specifically we combine regression discontinuity estimates that compare health outcomes and medical treatment provision for newborns on either side of the very low birth weight threshold at 1500 grams first using data on the census of us births in available years from 1983 2002 we find that newborns with birth weights just below 1500 grams have lower one year mortality rates than do newborns with birth weights just above this cutoff even though mortality risk tends to decrease with birth weight one year mortality falls by approximately one percentage point as birth weight crosses 1500 grams from above which is large relative to mean infant mortality of 5 5 just above 1500 grams second using hospital discharge records for births in five states in available years from 1991 2006 we find that newborns with birth weights just below 1500 grams have discontinuously higher charges and frequencies of specific medical inputs hospital costs increase by approximately 4 000 as birth weight crosses 1500 grams from above relative to mean hospital costs of 40 000 just above 1500 grams under an assumption that observed medical spending fully captures the impact of the very low birth weight designation on mortality our estimates suggest that the cost of saving a statistical life of a newborn with birth weight near 1500 grams is on the order of 550 000 in 2006 dollars

hospital ownership and public medical spending the hospital market is served by firms that are private for profit private not for profit and government owned and operated i use a plausibly exogenous change in hospital financing that was intended to improve medical care for the poor to test three theories of organizational behavior i find that the critical difference between the three types of hospitals is caused by the soft budget constraint of government owned institutions the decision makers in private not for profit hospitals are just as responsive to financial incentives and are no more altruistic than their counterparts in profit maximizing facilities my final set of results suggests that the significant increase in public medical spending examined in this paper has not improved health outcomes for the indigent i introduction the hospital market is served by firms that are private for profit private not for profit and publicly owned and operated in this paper i examine how a hospital s type of ownership influences its response to profitable opportunities that are created by changes in government policy the policy change that i exploit was designed to improve the quality of medical care for lowincome individuals by significantly increasing hospitals financial incentives to treat them this program also substantially increased the revenues of those hospitals that had been serving a disproportionate share of the indigent i use this plausibly exogenous change in government policy to test three different theories of organizational behavior and then to assess the impact of hospital behavioral responses on health outcomes the response of organizations to changes in government policy will have an important impact on the consequences of these policies this is likely to be especially true in the medical sector in which the federal state and local governments contract directly

sraffa marshall and the principle of continuity this article addresses piero sraffa s critique of alfred marshall s supply anddemand framework and sraffa s later book production of commodities taking into account an aspect that has been relatively neglected in the literature namely the ontology underlying the conceptions of sraffa and marshall this ontological dimension can be best understood through sraffa s critique of the principle of continuity the principle of continuity was used by marshall as a methodological justi cation for the use of partial equilibrium methods in the analysis of supply and demand in a context where different causes are deeply interconnected sraffa acknowledges the existence of interconnectedness but rejects marshall s methodology which is based on the principle of continuity as it becomes clear in his unpublished manuscripts which are examined here

health insurance and the demand for medical care evidence from a randomized experiment we estimate how cost sharing the portion of the bill the patient pays affects the demand for medical services the data come from a randomized experiment a catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out of pocket price the price elasticity is approximately 0 2 we reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure for example by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization

energy security in china a quantitative analysis and policy implications abstract this study aims to examine how china s energy security has changed over 30 years of reform and the opening period it constructs a 4 as quantitative evaluation framework the availability of energy resources the applicability of technology the acceptability by society and the affordability of energy resources the quantitative results show that china s energy security was at its best during the sixth fyp period 1981 1985 but then deteriorated until it hit higher levels between 1995 and 2005 however it was still lower than the level reached during the sixth fyp period during the eleventh fyp period 2006 2010 the energy security situation deteriorated again differences in policy priority over the study period appear to affect the country s energy security status this study suggests that china needs to develop renewable energy resources on a large scale and pay more attention to emissions control to reverse the downward trend in energy security

piero sraffa and the true object of economics the role of the unpublished manuscripts this special issue is concerned with the work of piero sraffa and with recent developments in its interpretation occasioned by the opening of the sraffa archives in late 1993 1 it brings together some of the contributions to a workshop on this theme that was sponsored by the cambridge journal of economics and held in july 2010 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of piero sraffa s major work production of commodities by means of commodities pcmc the original workshop on new perspectives on the work of piero sraffa was aimed at sraffa scholars who had taken the opportunity to engage with materials in the sraffa archives and who were interested in exploring their potential for revisiting and placing pcmc in the wider context of ongoing debates on economic philosophy economic theory and economic policy as is usually the case not all presentations made at the workshop were advanced for consideration in this special issue nor could all invitees attend heinz kurz as chief editor of the sraffa archives agreed to present his view on the relevance of the sraffa archives to research on sraffa and to comment on contributions at the workshop as well as on their final versions submitted for publication in this special issue kurz s contribution to this special issue was thus written in the short time available between the receipt of final versions and publication deadlines we are indebted to him for his cooperation in the preparation of this special issue we are especially grateful for his patience in the time taken to bring this project to publication this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a life cycle model of health and retirement the case of swedish pension reform abstract sweden is one of the few western economies to have undertaken a large pension reform in recent years this was done with great expectations but little formal analysis in this paper we develop a life cycle labor supply model to quantify the predicted labor supply implications of this reform in our framework individuals choose when to stop working and given eligibility criteria when if to apply for disability and pension benefits agents are heterogeneous in skills and receive exogenous shocks to health throughout their life we find that the new pension system creates large incentives for the continued employment of older workers this is promising news for countries grappling with pension reform and indicates that there are significant lessons to be learned from the swedish case

the role of unemployment insurance in an economy with liquidity constraints and moral hazard the potential welfare benefits of unemployment insurance along with the optimal replacement ratio are studied using a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model to provide a role for unemployment insurance agents in our economy face exogenous idiosyncratic employment shocks and are unable to borrow or insure themselves through private markets in the absence of moral hazard replacement ratios as high as 65 are optimal and the welfare benefits of unemployment insurance are quite large however if there is moral hazard and the replacement ratio is not set optimally but is instead set to an empirically plausible value the economy can be much worse off than it would be without unemployment insurance

disability earnings income and consumption using longitudinal data for the period 1968 2005 for a sample of male household heads we determine the prevalence of disability during the working years and examine how the extent of disability affects a range of outcomes including earnings income and consumption we have seven main findings first disability rates are high we divide the disabled along two dimensions based on the persistence and severity of their work limiting condition we estimate that a person reaching age 56 has a 53 percent chance of having been disabled at least once during his working years and a 19 percent chance that he has begun a chronic and severe disability second the economic consequences of disability are frequently profound ten years after disability onset a person with a chronic and severe disability on average experiences a 68 percent decline in earnings a 32 percent decline in after tax income a 22 percent decline in food and housing consumption and a 21 percent decline in food consumption third the various economic consequences differ sharply across disability groups the outcome declines for those with a chronic and severe disability are often more than twice as large as those for the average disabled fourth our findings show the partial and incomplete roles that individual savings family support and social insurance play in reducing the consumption drop that follows disability only about half of this most disabled group reports receiving social security disability insurance or supplemental security income fifth we find a noticeable fall in earnings and income prior to the onset of a reported disability consumption also falls somewhat suggesting that future disability is partially but incompletely predictable in the short run sixth time use and detailed consumption data further indicate that disability is associated with a decline in well being seventh the quantities we have estimated combined with elasticities from the literature allow us to examine the optimality of current compensation for the disabled we find that the current compensation for our most disabled group appears to be lower than is optimal

piero sraffa s monetary inflation in italy during and after the war an introduction the dissertation was highly appreciated by sraffa s thesis director luigi einaudi he did not share all the opinions expressed by sraffa on the subject but oral tradition has it that sraffa succeeded in convincing him that bringing the lira back to pre war gold parity was wrong einaudi recommended to the thesis committee that it be awarded the distinc tion of appearing as an official publication of the university of turin thus sraffa s first economic essay appeared in a small sleek volume in november 1920 privately printed by the premiata scuola tipografica salesiana presumably at the author s own expense in accordance with contemporary italian academic practice on the choice of thesis topic luigi einaudi might have had some say sraffa showed however by his immediately subsequent articles and book reviews that he was attracted to monetary and banking problems domestic as well as international his first and second articles in english published respectively in the manchester guardian commercial supplements on the reconstruction of europe and in the economic journal both in 1922 were commissioned by j m keynes whom he had first met in cambridge while he was at the london school of economics both concerned the structure and problems of the italian banking system after the war they made a permanent mark on the interpretation of italian banking history piero sraffa thus came to economics via monetary problems a route he shares with ricardo and keynes readers will note that sraffa s dissertation bears a remarkable resemblance as far as its main points are concerned to the central argument which

the health and earnings of rejected disability insurance applicants applicants for social security disability benefits who fail to pass the medical screening form a natural control group for beneficiaries data drawn from the 1972 and 1978 surveys of the disabled done for the social security administration show that fewer than 50 percent of rejected male applicants work typical earnings of those that do are less than 59 percent of median earnings for other men their age these data cast doubt on recent econometric work that suggests that the disincentive effects of the social security disability program have been substantial copyright 1989 by american economic association

the oregon health insurance experiment evidence from the first year in 2008 a group of uninsured low income adults in oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for medicaid this lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use financial strain and health of low income adults using a randomized controlled design in the year after random assignment the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected we find that in this first year the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations lower out of pocket medical expenditures and medical debt including fewer bills sent to collection and better self reported physical and mental health than the control group

the value of socialized medicine the impact of universal primary healthcare provision on mortality rates in turkey abstract this paper examines the impact of universal free and easily accessible primary healthcare on population health as measured by age specific mortality rates focusing on a nationwide socialized medicine program implemented in turkey the family medicine program fmp launched in 2005 assigns each turkish citizen to a specific state employed family physician who offers a wide range of primary healthcare services that are free of charge furthermore these services are provided at family health centers which operate on a walk in basis and are located within neighborhoods in close proximity to the patients to identify the causal impact of the fmp we exploit the variation in its introduction across provinces and over time our estimates indicate that the fmp caused the mortality rate to decrease by 25 6 among infants 7 7 among the elderly and 22 9 among children ages 1 4 these estimates translate into 2 6 1 29 and 0 13 fewer deaths among infants the elderly and children ages 1 4 respectively furthermore the effects appear to strengthen over time we also show evidence to suggest that the fmp has contributed to an equalization of mortality across provinces finally our calculations indicate that each family physician saves about 0 15 0 46 and 0 005 lives among infants the elderly and children ages 1 4 per province every year

a life cycle model of unemployment and disability insurance abstract a general equilibrium life cycle model is developed in which individuals choose a sequence of saving and labor supply faced with search frictions and uncertainty in longevity health status and medical expenditures unemployed individuals decide whether to apply for disability insurance di benefits if eligible we investigate the effects of cash transfer and in kind medicare component of the di system on the life cycle employment without medicare benefits di coverage could fall significantly we also study how di interacts with reforms of social security and medicare and find that di enrollment amplifies the effects of reforms

does disability insurance receipt discourage work using examiner assignment to estimate causal effects of ssdi receipt abstract we present the first causal estimates of the effect of social security disability insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants we use administrative data to matc

the impact of health care reform on hospital and preventive care evidence from massachusetts in april 2006 massachusetts passed legislation aimed at achieving near universal health insurance coverage the key features of this legislation were a model for national health reform passed in march 2010 the reform gives us a novel opportunity to examine the impact of expansion to near universal coverage state wide among hospital discharges in massachusetts we find that the reform decreased uninsurance by 36 relative to its initial level and to other states reform affected utilization by decreasing length of stay the number of inpatient admissions originating from the emergency room and preventable admissions at the same time hospital cost growth did not increase

medicaid insurance in old age the old age provisions of the medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses we estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime medicaid transfers and medicaid valuations across currently single retirees compensating variation calculations indicate that current retirees value medicaid insurance at more than its actuarial cost but that most would value an expansion of the current medicaid program at less than its cost these findings suggest that for current single retirees the medicaid program may be of the approximately right size

disability insurance and health insurance reform evidence from massachusetts abstract as health insurance becomes available outside of the employment relationship as a result of the affordable care act aca the cost of applying for social security disability insurance ssdi potentially going without health insurance coverage during a waiting period totaling 29 months from disability onset will decline for many people with employer sponsored health insurance at the same time the value of ssdi and supplemental security income ssi participation will decline for individuals who otherwise lacked access to health insurance we study the 2006 massachusetts health insurance reform to estimate the potential effects of the aca on ssdi and ssi applications

disability transfers self reported health and the labor force attachment of older men evidence from the historical record we use trends in self reported disability to gauge the impact of the growth of disability transfer programs on the labor force attachment of older working aged men our tabulations suggest that between 1949 and 1987 about half of the 4 9 percentage point drop in the labor force participation of men aged 45 54 and between one quarter and one third of the 19 9 point drop among men aged 55 64 represented a movement of men out of the labor force and onto the rolls of transfer programs targeted at the disabled since the expansion of transfer programs represents only one of the forces behind this movement these figures represent upper bounds on the impact of such programs on work force attachment

wages economic development and the customary standard of life this paper examines empirically the evolution of the customary standard of life and how this relates to real wages and economic development its starting point is sraffa s reintroduction of the classical notion of wages as the cost of reproducing labour so that they are necessarily a charge on production however when considering a production system generating a surplus sraffa offered no explanation of how the surplus might be realised and distributed rather he concentrated on the choice of technique as the profit share varied from 0 to 1 his approach was one of taking a snapshot of a productive system at a point in time in contrast this paper explores the trend in wages in the uk over the past 150 years and the evolving level and composition of what became the social necessities of worker consumption i e the customary standard of life in this process four dynamically interacting processes can be identified i a progressive increase in the productive potential of the system ii the diffusion of a greater quantity and varieties of consumer goods the growth of property ownership by consumers and their use of credit in a cumulative improvement in their customary standard of life iii the consolidation of the customary standard of life into real wages by collective bargaining and iv diffusion of improved living standards by an extension of collective bargaining coverage to include groups previously excluded and the growth of the welfare state in which the failure to achieve the customary standard of life defines poverty and triggers policy designed to alleviate it the central role played by the customary standard of life in driving real wages means that the inputs of labour power into commodity production can be represented by the commodity composition of the customary standard of life in sraffa style analyses in this the successive cross sections in the historical flow of economic development showing the commodity flows into and out of production will be ever changing like the still frames in a moving picture show moreover such a historical approach rules out the possibility that at any time changes in the rate of profit will precipitate the switching of methods of production past choices of techniques are historically embedded in the capital stock the composition of which is modified by new investment and the scrapping of old as it wears out becomes technically outmoded and or demand for its products declines nevertheless changes in the distribution of income have consequences for the future path of economic and social development and what this might be is arguably the most useful area for economic and social research copyright oxford university press

the aggregate effects of health insurance evidence from the introduction of medicare this paper investigates the effects of market wide changes in health insurance by examining the single largest change in health insurance coverage in american history the introduction of medicare in 1965 i estimate that the impact of medicare on hospital spending is over six times larger than what the evidence from individual level changes in health insurance would have predicted this disproportionately larger effect may arise if market wide changes in demand alter the incentives of hospitals to incur the fixed costs of entering the market or of adopting new practice styles i present some evidence of these types of effects a back of the envelope calculation based on the estimated impact of medicare suggests that the overall spread of health insurance between 1950 and 1990 may be able to explain about half of the increase in real per capita health spending over this time period

disability insurance and the dynamics of the incentive insurance trade off we provide a life cycle framework for comparing insurance and disincentive effects of disability benefits the risks that individuals face and the parameters of the disability insurance di program are estimated from consumption health disability insurance and wage data we characterize the effects of disability insurance and study how policy reforms impact behavior and welfare di features high rejection rates of disabled applicants and some acceptance of healthy applicants despite worse incentives welfare increases as programs become less strict or generosity increases disability insurance interacts with welfare programs making unconditional means tested programs more generous improves disability insurance targeting and increases welfare

another look at the impacts of health reform in massachusetts evidence using new data and a stronger model in april 2006 massachusetts enacted a comprehensive health care reform bill that seeks to move the state to near universal insurance coverage the bill included expanded eligibility for public coverage subsidized insurance market reforms requirements for employers and most controversial an individual mandate a study of the early impacts of the state s initiative found evidence of a substantial drop in uninsurance from 13 to 7 percent for nonelderly adults long 2008 because that study relied on a simple pre post comparison it is possible that the estimates of the impact of health reform reflect both the changes under health reform and factors beyond health reform that changed over the same period leading to biased estimates of the impacts of reform lawrence b mohr 1995 this paper expands on the earlier work to estimate the impacts of health reform in massachusetts using new data and a stronger research design specifically we rely on data over time for massachusetts and other states from the current population survey cps to estimate difference in differences dd models jeffrey m wooldridge 2002

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

on the present state of the capital controversy the post war capital controversy seems to have had two distinguishable stages thanks to the unambiguous phenomena of reswitching and reverse capital deepening the first stage was conclusive in discarding from pure theory the traditional versions of neoclassical theory that relied on the notion of capital as a single quantity subsequently however when the implications of those phenomena took centre stage in the controversy together with the reformulations of the theory which intended to do away with the quantity of capital several misunderstandings prevented i shall contend decisive progress in the analysis and we entered an inconclusive phase of the discussion

aching to retire the rise in the full retirement age and its impact on the social security disability rolls abstract the social security amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of social security retired worker benefits in the u s by increasing the program s full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62 these changes were phased in gradually so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected no corresponding changes were made to the program s disabled worker benefits and thus the relative generosity of social security disability insurance ssdi benefits increased in this paper we investigate the effect of the amendments on ssdi enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits our findings indicate that the amendments significantly increased ssdi enrollment since 1983 with an additional 0 6 of men and 0 9 of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving ssdi benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties

evaluation of electricity supply sustainability and security multi criteria decision analysis approach abstract electricity supply plays a significantly important role in national economy and society development accordingly the evaluation of electricity supply sustainability and security as an early warning method is beneficial for the decision makers policy makers to take various measures to enhance electricity supply sustainability and security this study aims at developing a multi criteria decision analysis framework for electricity supply sustainability and security evaluation and a total of nine metrics i e shannon weiner index electricity import dependence supply adequacy rural electrification rate electric power losses ratio residential consumption ratio electricity per gross domestic product electric power consumption per capita and fossil fuel dependence in four dimensions including availability and security of supply affordability and reliability energy and economic efficiency and environmental stewardship were employed for electricity supply sustainability and security evaluation fuzzy analytic hierarchy process which allows the users to use linguistic terms to express their opinions was used to determine the weights of the criteria which represent their relative importance in the evaluation of electricity supply sustainability and security grey rational analysis was used to prioritize the status of electricity supply sustainability and security of different countries in different years the electricity supply sustainability and security of the five major emerging national economies brazil russia india china and south africa was studied in chinese perspective by the proposed method

consumption retirement and social security evaluating the efficiency of reform that encourages longer careers abstract this paper proposes and analyzes a social security reform in which individuals no longer face the oasi payroll tax after say age 54 or a career of 34 years and their subsequent earnings have no bearing on their benefits we first estimate parameters of a life cycle model our specification includes non separable preferences and possible disability it predicts a consumption expenditure change at retirement we use the magnitude of the expenditure change together with households retirement age decisions to identify key structural parameters the estimated magnitude of the change in consumption expenditure depends importantly on the treatment of consumption by adult children of the household simulations indicate that the reform could increase retirement ages one year or more equivalent variations could average more than 4000 per household and income tax revenues per household could increase by more than 14 000

piero sraffa and the future of economics how did piero sraffa look at the future of economic theory first when he arrived in england in the mid 1920s and then after the publication of his extraordinarily compact little book production of commodities by means of commodities 1960 the author sifts through sraffa s published works and abundant unpublished papers his acquaintances and personal contacts and vicissitudes the conclusions he arrives at remain problematical but do not refrain him from clearly expressing his specific quite definite views copyright oxford university press

on alternative notions of change and choice krishna bharadwaj s legacy krishna bharadwaj following upon the work and insights of sraffa made substantial contributions to our understanding of what is implied in the neoclassical notion of change and its related notion of choice in this respect she appears closer to the spirit of sraffa s critique of neoclassical theory than many others she also supplemented important elements in building an alternative approach based on classical political economy which is free from the need to employ marginal magnitudes and does not require hypothetical or potential changes to determine the resting positions of economic variables moreover the notion of choice is rescued from the parable of preferences and given more meaningful contents allowing for consideration of habits customs and power relationships 1 premise the consumption and production of goods is the kind of human activity to which the term economic is applied in most societies these activities are mediated through exchange and in capitalist societies exchange is performed in organised markets in the history of economic thought a range of different conceptions have been put forward to explain how individuals interact in markets and various accounts have been advanced of ways to understand which are the incentives and the constraints affecting their behaviour and decision making in neoclassical theories choices in consumption and production are conceptualised through reasoning at the margin under the ceteris paribus assumption i e that everything else remains unchanged this method provides the means to measure the effects of a small technically infinitesimal variation in quantities of selected variables such as utility and cost which are compared with the relevant prices to determine the optimum choice by individuals the optimal choice framework is in fact the basis upon which price and quantities are simultaneously determined in the neoclassical world

the neo ricardians focuses on the neoclassical theory of economics in great britain calculation for the standard commodity assumptions of piedro sraffa on the cycle of production functions of the rate of return ebsco

the political economy of production of commodities by means of commodities a comment on pasinetti and sraffa luigi pasinetti s contribution in this special issue highlights the complexity and richness of sraffa s sources and points to the diversity of the streams of thought that may be detected behind sraffa s original research programme in particular pasinetti calls attention to the heuristic value of sraffa s unpublished manuscripts in assessing the constructive effort of production of commodities by means of commodities pcc this paper moves further along the above line of investigation and explores the smithian strand of pcc in particular the paper highlights that the duality between horizontal and vertical prices explored by both sraffa and pasinetti points to the existence of different complementary causal linkages in classical political economy vertical integration makes it possible to resolve prices into a sum of weighted quantities of labour and calls attention to the system of weights needed for this operation alternative weighting systems may be associated with alternative institutional arrangements for example a traditional wage profit economy would attach increasingly higher weights to increasingly remote quantities of labour but the analytics of vertical integration also raises the institutional possibility of increasingly lower weights as increasingly remote labour quantities are considered the paper argues that by assessing together the horizontal ricardian and vertical smithian strands of pcc it is possible to grasp more fully the theoretical potential of this work in particular it becomes possible to distinguish between the identification of general causal principles and the instantiation of those principles in specific historical contexts copyright oxford university press

towards a new complexity economics for sustainability some of the most important and urgent topics requiring economic analysis and policy advice are the problems of climate change and environmental sustainability and what can be done to alter corporate and individual behaviour to deal with these issues neoclassical economists tend to focus on market solutions such as carbon trading drawing on ideas of perfect rationality of actors and the appropriateness of marginal analysis to link such policies to the whole range of potential actions from legislative and regulatory to changing individual behaviours requires the economy and society to be analysed in its full complexity recognising that marginal analysis can be not just irrelevant but positively harmful when the need is for systemic shifts in economic and social trajectories this article draws upon a seminar series on complexity economics to consider how heterodox economic analysis can be brought to bear on the issue of the environment to develop a realistic policy agenda for change copyright oxford university press

disability benefit take up and local labor market conditions exploiting county level variation in oil producing areas from shocks to world oil and gas prices we study how local labor market conditions affect disability take up we extend well known previous work using a similar research design by analyzing a different price shock a larger more representative set of labor markets and a more recent period marked by skyrocketing disability payments our estimated elasticity for ssdi payments with respect to earnings of 0 29 is surprisingly similar to earlier findings our preferred ssi elasticity estimate of 0 16 is smaller than previous findings but we show that ssi programmatic changes explain most of the difference jel codes j0 h0

the impact of economic conditions on participation in disability programs evidence from the coal boom and bust abstract we examine the impact of the coal boom of the 1970 s and the coal bust of the 1980 s on disability program participation these shocks provide clear evidence that as the value of labor market participation increases disability program participation falls for the disability insurance program the elasticity of payments with respect to local earnings is between 0 3 and 0 4 and for supplemental security income the elasticity is between 0 4 and 0 7 consistent with a model where qualifying for disability programs is costly the relationship between economic conditions and program participation is much stronger for permanent than for transitory economic shocks

the 1983 social security reforms and labor supply adjustments of older individuals in the long run a structural life cycle retirement model with an improved specification over previous models is used to analyze and compare the long run effects on the labor supply of older workers of the 1983 social security reforms the effects of separate provisions from the 1983 amendments are examined these include the raising of the normal retirement age to 67 the increase in the delayed retirement credit to 8 and the lowering of the reduction rate for earnings over the test amount to 1 00 for every 3 00 of earnings

circuitous processes jigsaw puzzles and indisputable results making best use of the manuscripts of sraffa s production of commodities by means of commodities the opening of the sraffa archive has allowed the production of credible narratives of the development of sraffa s thought based on documentary evidence the archive is complex especially in the case of the papers relating to production of commodities by means of commodities pcmc but the author s paperwork helps guide us through the development of his ideas affirming the causal relationship between thought and archive the complex interrelationships between materials in the archive make a painstaking scholarly approach necessary but rewarding allowing authors to use material of high evidential value to corroborate the cases they are making the archive has primarily been used by historians of economic thought however as the material contextualises pcmc it may also be useful to those working on economic theory from a sraffian perspective copyright oxford university press

who benefits from local oil and gas employment labor market composition in the oil and gas industry in texas and the rest of the united states abstract this paper examines local labor market outcomes from an oil and gas boom we examine two main outcomes the probability of employment and the log wages of workers employed outside the oil and gas industry for texas and the rest of the united states across gender race and ethnicity we find that men and women gain employment in the oil and gas industry during booms but such gains are much larger for men and are largest for black and hispanic men we also find positive income spillovers for workers in other industries that are similar in magnitude across demographic groups

do premium tax credits increase private health insurance coverage evidence from the 2006 massachusetts health care reform i use the current population survey march supplement and a regression discontinuity design to demonstrate a positive impact of premium tax credits implemented as a part of the 2006 health reform in massachusetts on non group private health insurance coverage

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 effect of medicaid expansion on crime reduction evidence from hifa waiver expansions abstract substance use figures prominently in criminal behavior as such expanding public insurance and improving access to substance use disorder sud treatment can potentially reduce substance use and reduce crime we examine the crime reduction effect of medicaid expansions through the health insurance flexibility and accountability hifa waivers we find that hifa waiver expansion led to a sizeable reduction in the rates of robbery aggravated assault and larceny theft we also show that much of the crime reduction effect likely occurred through increasing sud treatment rate and reducing substance use prevalence the implied benefit cost ratio estimate of increased treatment on reducing crime ranges from 1 8 to 3 2

adverse selection and an individual mandate when theory meets practice we develop a model of selection that incorporates a key element of recent health reforms an individual mandate using data from massachusetts we estimate the parameters of the model in the individual market for health insurance we find that premiums and average costs decreased significantly in response to the individual mandate we find an annual welfare gain of 4 1 per person or 51 1 million annually in massachusetts as a result of the reduction in adverse selection we also find smaller post reform markups

the impact of nearly universal insurance coverage on health care utilization evidence from medicare the onset of medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the u s population these changes lead to increases in the use of medical services with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by type of service while routine doctor visits increase more for groups that previously lacked insurance hospital admissions for relatively expensive procedures like bypass surgery and joint replacement increase more for previously insured groups that are more likely to have supplementary coverage after 65 reflecting the relative generosity of their combined insurance package under medicare

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site