hospital choices hospital prices and financial incentives to physicians we estimate an insurer speci c preference function which rationalizes hospital referrals for privately insured births in california the function is additively separable in a hospital price paid by the insurer the distance traveled and plan and severity speci c hospital xed eects capturing hospital quality we use an inequality estimator that allows for errors in price and detailed hospital severity interactions and obtain markedly dierent results than those from a logit the estimates indicate that insurers with more capitated physicians are more responsive to price capitated plans send patients further to utilize similar quality lower priced hospitals but the cost quality trade odoes not vary with capitation rates the patient protection and aordable care act of 2010 includes provisions to establish ac countable care organizations acos in the medicare program these are groups of health care providers that oer services to a large number of patients and are eligible to share in any cost savings they achieve for the medicare program 1 private sector acos are forming in parallel to this initiative often with very similar structures and payment arrangements the proportion of savings acos keep is linked to their performance on quality standards the goal of the initiative is to reduce health care costs in both medicare and private insurance and to improve coordination of care the tying of cost savings to quality standards is designed to mitigate the concern that an increase in incentives to control costs might lead to a decrease in the quality of care the health policy literature has noted that similar cost control incentives are currently utilized by some health maintenance organizations hmos in california and elsewhere 2 in this paper we investigate the impact of these incentives on the cost and quality of care provided to patients focusing in particular on the choice of hospital for privately insured patients giving birth we use

equilibrium effects of health care price information do information frictions in health care markets lead to higher prices and price dispersion focusing on medical imaging procedures this paper examines the equilibrium effect of a unique statewide

choosy search and the mismatch of talents this article proposes a multi sector matching model where workers have symmetric sector specific skills and the search market is segmented by sector workers choose the range of markets they are willing to participate in i identify a composition externality workers do not take into account the impact of their choice on sector specific mean productivity among the pools of job seekers consequently workers prospect too many market segments and there is room for public policy even when the so called hosios condition holds

mass education or a minority well educated elite in the process of growth the case of india abstract this paper analyzes whether mass education is more growth enhancing in developing countries than having a minority well educated elite using indian census data as a benchmark and enrollment rates at different levels of education we compute annual attainment levels for a panel of 16 indian states from 1961 to 2001 results indicate that if the reduction in illiteracy stops at the primary level of education it is not worthwhile for growth instead the findings reveal a strong and significant effect on growth of a greater share of population completing tertiary education the economic impact is also found to be large a one percent change in tertiary education has the same effect on growth as a 13 decrease in illiteracy rates a sensitivity analysis shows the results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variables structural breaks reverse causation or atypical observations

switching regression models with imperfect sample separation information with an application on cartel stability an exogenous switching regression model with imperfect reginme classificationi information is specified and applied to a study of cartel stability an efficient estimation method is proposed which takes this imperfect information into account the consequences of misclassification are analyzed the direction of the least squares bias is derived an optimal regime classification rule is obtained and compared theoretically and empirically with other classification rules we then examine the joint executive committee a railroad cartel in the 1880 s the econometric evidence indicates that reversions to noncooperative behavior did occur for the firms in our sample and these reversions involve a significant decrease in market price this article is concerned with the possibility of estimating a switching regression model and its application to a study on cartel stability the switching regression model is the exogenous switching model proposed by quandt 24 which generalized a problem of mixture distributions day 4 the sample in this model is generated from distinct regression equations or regimes for each time period if the investigator has a priori information on how the sample is partitioned into the underlying regimes it is a switching regression model with known sample separation otherwise it is a model with unknown sample separation estimation of these latter models has been considered by quandt 24 goldfeld and quandt 8 and kiefer 14 16 among others a switching regression model is appropriate for the study of cartel behavior when there are price wars as firms will revert from cooperative to noncooperative behavior and so the industry supply function shifts occasionally this model will allow us to exploit the fact that there will be periodic stochastic switches or reversions between cooperative and noncooperative conduct in order to identify collusive episodes

measuring welfare from ambulatory surgery centers a spatial analysis of demand for healthcare facilities this paper studies competition between healthcare facilities particularly between hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers asc s in the market for outpatient surgery the goal is to answer questions about the existence and magnitude of welfare gains earned from the use of asc s these questions are relevant to current policy debates about the usefulness of asc s i calculate welfare by specifying a multinomial logit model of consumer demand for healthcare facilities and estimating structural elements of demand functions total elimination of asc s results in between 10 2 and 28 1 minutes of welfare loss per patient surgery

how do sex ratios affect marriage and labor markets evidence from america s second generation sex ratios i e relative numbers of men and women can affect marriage prospects labor force participation and other social and economic variables but the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality this paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants the flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous i e to members of the same ethnic group the empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage and a large negative effect on female labor force participation perhaps surprisingly the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children the empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market

hospital systems and bargaining power evidence from out of market acquisitions competition analyses generally restrict their attention to how mergers alter concentration in the relevant consumer market studying hospital competition by focusing on the local patient market may be misleading however as multi market hospital systems often play an important role in the price negotiations of their members with managed care organizations we focus on out of market hospital mergers to investigate the cross market effects of system membership on member hospital reimbursement rates based on acquisitions occurring across the united states during 2000 2008 we find that hospitals exhibit significant increases of around 14 in their net reimbursement rates after becoming affiliated with an out of market system compared to independent stand alone hospitals we find no evidence that the price effect results from changes in patient case mix the cost of providing care generally or hospital quality the findings reveal that systems can impact the market power of hospitals in ways that have not been considered in recent antitrust analysis

help wanted job needed estimates of a matching function from employment service data i estimate a function that matches vacant jobs and unemployed workers to produce new hires israeli law requiring vacancy registration yields unique data quality the literature underestimates matching function coefficients because of a simultaneity bias as the outflow of hires depletes stocks of unemployed and vacancies instruments and a new simulation method address this bias a new test reveals strong evidence of heterogeneity in unemployed and vacancies estimates imply labor market dynamics that absorb shocks completely within only 2 months reductions in the hire rate of referrals can explain a 2 1 percentage point increase in unemployment between 1978 and 1990

reemployment probabilities and returns to matching the assumption of constant returns in the matching function embodied in most bilateral search models is crucial to ensure the uniqueness of the unemployment rate along a steady state growth path this article explores the empirical viability of this assumption by estimating individual reemployment probabilities on a sample of unemployment entrants i apply hazard models to survey data on both completed and uncompleted unemployment durations the hypothesis of constant returns to matching is not rejected on the basis of the evidence that the job finding hazard depends only on local labor market tightness and is independent of its size

a study of cartel stability the joint executive committee 1880 1886 this article employs weekly time series data on the joint executive committee railroad cartel from 1880 to 1886 to test empirically the proposition that observed prices reflected switches from collusive to noncooperative behavior an equilibrium model of dynamic oligopoly with asymmetric firms together with explicit functional form assumptions about costs and demand determines the estimating equations and stochastic structure of the econometric model the hypothesis that no switch took place so that price and quantity movements were solely attributable to exogenous shifts in the demand and cost functions is then tested against this alternative and rejected

the right man for the job this paper describes a search model with a continuum of worker and job types free entry and transferable utility we apply a second order taylor expansion to characterize the equilibrium derive the cost of search and show that it is decreasing in the substitutability of worker types this cost of search is then decomposed into three components unemployment vacancy costs and mismatch our contact technology rules out congestion effects between different worker types and therefore exhibits increasing returns to scale one third of those increasing returns in contacts are shown to be absorbed by firms and workers being more choosy the resulting equilibrium is not efficient unemployment benefits can reduce the loss by serving as a search subsidy numerical simulations of the model show that our taylor expansions are quite accurate 2004 the review of economics studies limited

health insurance and the demand for medical care instrumental variable estimates using health insurer claims data this paper takes a different approach to estimating demand for medical care that uses the negotiated prices between insurers and providers as an instrument the instrument is viewed as a textbook cost shifting instrument that impacts plan offerings but is unobserved by consumers the paper finds a price elasticity of demand of around 0 20 matching the elasticity found in the rand health insurance experiment the paper also studies within market variation in demand for prescription drugs and other medical care services and obtains comparable price elasticity estimates

unemployment and market size without strong empirical support labour market matching models typically assume constant returns to scale in matching we construct a tractable equilibrium random matching model with a general matching technology introducing market size effects the job finding rate varies with unemployment stable steady states may occur in regions of increasing or decreasing returns and multiple equilibria are welfare ranked by market size while the standard model relies on high frequency shocks to the steady state to explain the co movement of unemployment and job finding locally decreasing returns in matching generate plausible adjustment dynamics and slower convergence lastly an extension of the hosios condition internalises search externalities

the enigma of india india s high growth over the last fifteen years has inspired several recent books and papers to examine the growth s source and sustainability the two volume study by arvind virmani being a case in point this paper evaluates these recent works it is argued that the cause of the take off does not fit into any easy ideological category as suggested by virmani the current high growth has been achieved in several steps with distinct factors of propulsion behind each step there is reason to expect the growth to be sustainable although destabilizing political tensions will arise from the increasing inequality the paper also evaluates how india s growth relates to the global economy

competition among hospitals we examine competition in the hospital industry in particular the effect of ownership type for profit not for profit government we estimate a structural model of demand and pricing in the hospital industry in california then use the estimates to simulate the effect of a merger california hospitals in 1995 face an average price elasticity of demand of 4 85 not for profit hospitals face less elastic demand and act as if they have lower marginal costs their prices are lower than those of for profits but markups are higher we simulate the effects of the 1997 merger of two hospital chains in san luis obispo county where the merger creates a near monopoly prices rise by up to 53 and the predicted price increase would not be substantially smaller were the chains not for profit

short run demand for palestinian labor palestinian residents of the west bank and gaza strip who work in israel generally earn more than palestinians employed locally but this wage premium is highly volatile beginning with the 1987 palestinian uprising changes in wage differentials by work location parallel palestinian absences from work in israel this article interprets changing location differentials in response to exogenous shocks as movements along an israeli demand curve for migrant workers estimates of a model of the west bank and gaza strip labor market are used to evaluate the effect of policies governing palestinian access to the israeli labor market

the v factor distribution timing and correlates of the great indian growth turnaround we analyze a panel of output series for india disaggregated by 15 states and 14 broad industry groups using principal components bai 2004 bai and ng 2004 we find that a single common v factor captures well the significant shift in the cross sectional distribution of state sectoral output growth rates since the 2nd half of the 1980s the timing of the turnaround implied by the v factor is more closely related to the pattern of policy reforms than has been found in previous research regression based analysis also provides some insights into the uneven distribution of the turnaround across indian states

the new econometrics of structural change dating breaks in u s labor productivity we have seen the emergence of three major innovations in the econometrics of structural change in the past fifteen years 1 tests for a structural break of unknown timing 2 estimation of the timing of a structural break and 3 tests to distinguish unit roots from broken time trends these three innovations have dramatically altered the face of applied time series econometrics in this paper we review these three innovations and illustrate their application through an empirical assessment of u s labor productivity in the manufacturing durables sector

price and concentration in hospital markets the switch from patient driven to payer driven competition perhaps the most widely accepted paradigm of industrial organization i o is that competition lowers prices or alternatively that price cost margins are lower in less concentrated markets 1 the applicability of this paradigm for hospital markets has been questioned for example in united states vs carilion health system and roanoke valley hospital the district and appellate courts accepted evidence that hospital prices are lower in more concentrated markets and thereby approved a merger between the two largest hospitals in a three hospital market 2 the view that competition has a weak or perverse effect on hospital prices is shared by a number of researchers 3 is a common theme in newspaper stories

the competitive effects of not for profit hospital mergers a case study applying conventional horizontal merger enforcement rules to nonprofit hospitals is controversial critics contend that the different objective function of not for profits entities should mitigate competitive concerns about mergers involving nonprofit hospitals we analyze a merger that reduced the number of competitors both nonprofit in the alleged relevant market from three to two we find that the transaction was followed by significant price increases we reject the hypothesis that these price increases reflect higher post merger quality this study should help policymakers assess the validity of current merger enforcement rules especially as they apply to not for profit enterprises

the industrial organization of health care markets the u s health care sector is large and growing health care spending in 2011 amounted to 2 7 trillion and 18 percent of gdp approximately half of health care output is allocated via markets in this paper we analyze the industrial organization literature on health care markets focusing on the impact of competition on price quality and treatment decisions for health care providers and health insurers we conclude with a discussion of research opportunities for industrial organization economists including opportunities created by the u s patient protection and affordable care act

the price ain t right hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured we use insurance claims data for 27 6 percent of individuals with private employer sponsored insurance in the us between 2007 and 2011 to examine the variation in health spending and in hospitals transaction prices we document the variation in hospital prices within and across geographic areas examine how hospital prices influence the variation in health spending on the privately insured and analyze the factors associated with hospital price variation four key findings emerge first health care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three across the 306 hospital referral regions hrrs in the us moreover the correlation between total spending per privately insured beneficiary and total spending per medicare beneficiary across hrrs is only 0 14 second variation in providers transaction prices across hrrs is the primary driver of spending variation for the privately insured whereas variation in the quantity of care provided across hrrs is the primary driver of medicare spending variation consequently extrapolating lessons on health spending from medicare to the privately insured must be done with caution third we document large dispersion in overall inpatient hospital prices and in prices for seven relatively homogenous procedures for example hospital prices for lower limb mris vary by a factor of twelve across the nation and on average two fold within hrrs finally hospital prices are positively associated with indicators of hospital market power even after conditioning on many demand and cost factors hospital prices in monopoly markets are 15 3 percent higher than those in markets with four or more hospitals

the role of hospital competition on treatment expenditure and outcome evidence from stroke and cardiac treatment in taiwan this article examines whether market competition affects treatment expenditure and health outcomes of stroke and cardiac treatment in taiwan our measure of treatment expenditure is the hospital expenditure paid at the index admission short term and the sum of inpatient and outpatient expenditures paid in the subsequent year long term our measure of health outcome is the probability of death in 1 and 12 months after the hospital s discharge our measure of competition follows the method developed by kessler and mcclellan that calculates the herfindal index based on the predicted patient flows using exogenous variables e g traveling distance to hospitals using data of patients hospitalized for new stroke and cardiac treatment between 1997 and 2001 in taiwan we find that an increase of market competition results in an insignificant impact on a patient s mortality in terms of treatment expenditure our results indicate that hospitals facing more competition incur higher expenditures either the short or long term expenditure finally we find evidence showing that an increase of treatment expenditure at admission is due to a raise of length of stay and treatment intensity per day as well as the usage of expensive equipment jel i11 l13 l41

how local are labor markets evidence from a spatial job search model this paper models the optimal search strategies of the unemployed across space to characterize local labor markets our methodology allows for linkages between numerous areas while preserving tractability we estimate that labor markets are quite local as the attractiveness of jobs to applicants sharply decays with distance also workers are discouraged from searching in areas with strong job competition from other jobseekers however as labor markets overlap a local stimulus or transport improvements have modest effects on local outcomes because ripple effects in job applications dilute their impact across a series of overlapping markets

can empirical demand models assist in con comparative reviews a case study in florida certificate of need con programs for new hospital construction are intended to foster the best selection among competing hospital applications given demands for hospital care in the community yet the merits of con depend in part on the quality of the comparative review process this article examines a case study in florida to illustrate the utility of empirical evaluations using patient choice models i estimate such models to show how patients would respond to a change in hospital choices by simulating the welfare effects of the proposed hospitals i can further predict how prices of hospital care differ by applicant results suggest that empirical analysis using data on patient choice of hospitals may better inform the review process at the same time however it may not give a unique ranking without additional analysis of the fixed costs of proposed services in the context of existing marketwide capacity

mergers when prices are negotiated evidence from the hospital industry in recent years many hospitals have merged in part to gain bargaining leverage with managed care organizations mcos we investigate the price impact of hospital mergers by formulating and estimating an equilibrium bargaining model between hospital systems and managed care health insurers over prices for inpatient services we estimate the parameters of the model using claims and discharge data from northern virginia in 2006 inova health system proposed to acquire prince william hospital we nd that this merger would have raised prices signicantly and that the remedy of separate bargaining imposed by the ftc in a separate hospital case would have resulted in a larger price increase

the welfare effects of restricted hospital choice in the us medical care market summary managed care health insurers in the usa restrict their enrollees choice of hospitals to within specific networks this paper considers the implications of these restrictions a three step econometric model is used to predict consumer preferences over health plans conditional on the hospitals they offer the results indicate that consumers place a positive and significant weight on their expected utility from the hospital network when choosing plans a welfare analysis assuming fixed prices implies that restricting consumers choice of hospitals leads to a loss to society of approximately 1 billion per year across the 43 us markets considered this figure may be outweighed by the price reductions generated by the restriction copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

managed care s price bargaining with hospitals research has shown that managed care mc slowed the rate of growth in health care spending in the 1990s primarily via lower unit prices paid however the mechanism of mc s price bargaining has not been well studied this article uses a unique panel dataset with actual hospital prices in massachusetts between 1994 and 2000 to examine the sources of mc s bargaining power i find two significant determinants of price discounts first plans with large memberships are able to extract volume discounts across hospitals second health plans that are more successful at channeling patients can extract greater discounts patient channeling can add to the volume discount that plans negotiate

is india s economic growth leaving the poor behind there has been much debate about how much india s poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s the authors argue that india has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s however there is considerable diversity in performance across states this holds some important clues for understanding why economic growth has not done more for india s poor india s economic growth in the 1990s has not been occurring in the states where it would have the most impact on poverty nationally if not for the sectoral and geographic imbalance of growth the national rate of growth would have generated a rate of poverty reduction that was double india s historical trend rate states with relatively low levels of initial rural development and human capital development were not well suited to reduce poverty in response to economic growth the study s results are consistent with the view that achieving higher aggregate economic growth is only one element of an effective strategy for poverty reduction in india the sectoral and geographic composition of growth is also important as is the need to redress existing inequalities in human resource development and between rural and urban areas

job vacancy rates in the firm an empirical analysis this paper presents some evidence on the magnitudes and determinants of job vacancy rates in us firms based on data from a survey in 1980 and 1982 the results show low overall vacancy rates but substantial variation across firms occupations industries and local areas local unemployment unionization and employer size have negative effects on vacancy rates while turnover and sales growth have positive effects the results are generally consistent with the predictions of job matching models

the effect of network arrangements on hospital pricing behavior the department of justice doj and the federal trade commission ftc have taken a recent interest in collaborations among hospitals that do not entail common ownership despite the lack of scientific evidence regarding effects of these hospital networks on market competition this paper explores the relationship between hospital networks and pricing behavior in california during a period of dynamic increase in hospital network activity there using herfindahl hirschman indexes hhi market definitions based on patient origin and accounting for network relationships we find a positive network effect on hospital pricing however this result appears to be generated primarily by system owned hospitals that form networks to provide particular services jointly

labor heterogeneity in an urban labor market abstract we construct a model of agglomeration economies in a labor market with friction and heterogeneity of both workers and firms with friction matches between workers and firms are random we show that with random matches an increase in the number of workers brings improvements in worker firm match quality and agglomeration economies emerge if and only if the technology of search exhibits increasing returns to scale we then discuss how to find out empirically whether this condition is satisfied furthermore we investigate properties of the agglomeration economies here and the relation between the city size and states of a labor market

hospital insurer bargaining an empirical investigation of appendectomy pricing employers increased sensitivity to health care costs has forced insurers to seek ways to lower costs through effective bargaining with providers what factors determine the prices negotiated between hospitals and insurers the hospital insurer interaction is captured in the context of a bargaining model in which the gains from bargaining are explicitly defined appendectomy was chosen because it is a well defined procedure with little clinical variation our results show that certain hospital institutional arrangements e g hospital affiliations hmo penetration and greater hospital concentration improve hospitals bargaining position furthermore hospitals bargaining effectiveness has diminished over time and varies across states

providers affiliation insurance and collusion abstract this paper provides a theoretical analysis of the benefits for an insurance company to develop its own network of service providers when insurance fraud is characterized by collusion between policyholders and providers in a static framework without collusion exclusive affiliation of providers allows insurance companies to recover some market power and to lessen competition on the insurance market this entails a decrease in the insured s welfare however exclusive affiliation of providers may entail a positive effect on customers surplus when insurers and providers are engaged in a repeated relationship in particular while insurers must cooperate to retaliate against a fraudulent provider under non exclusive affiliation no cooperation is needed under exclusive affiliation in that case an insurer is indeed able to reduce the profit of a malevolent provider by moving to collusion proof contracts when collusion is detected and this threat may act as a deterrent for fraudulent activities this possibility may supplement an inefficient judicial system it is thus a second best optimal anti fraud policy

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

hospital competition in hmo networks abstract we develop a framework for analyzing bargaining relationships between hospitals and hmos under selective contracting using a unique dataset on hospitals in the los angeles area from 1990 to 1993 we estimate the determinants of actual negotiated prices paid to hospitals by two major hmos we find that a hospital s bargaining power and thus its price decrease when the hmo can readily turn to alternative networks that exclude the hospital we simulate the effect of hypothetical hospital mergers on bargaining power and find that some hospital mergers even in urban areas with many nearby hospitals can lead to significant price increases

labour market policies and unemployment in the oecd unemployment policies richard jackman christopher pissarides and sawas savouri the massive increase in unemployment throughout the oecd since the early 1970s has led governments in many countries to introduce or to expand labour market policies such as training schemes employment subsidies public works or schemes of counselling or assistance in job search such programmes have the objective of reducing unemployment by improving the workings of the labour market after a description of these programmes this article proposes a framework based on the relationship between unemployment and vacancies or beveridge curve within which the rise in unemployment can be analysed and the effects of policies and of institutions examined this framework helps to identify the main factors which have affected the unemployment and vacancy rates in 14 of the main oecd countries over the period 1970 88 the main results are that while corporatism remains the institutional feature with the biggest single impact in sustaining low unemployment rates labour market policies also have had a significant and well defined effect on unemployment which appears large relative to the budgetary costs of the programmes

factors impacting market concentration of not for profit hospitals we attempt to identify and evaluate the association between key characteristics of not for profit np hospitals and market concentration as measured by the herfindahl hirschman index using data available from the american hospital association the centers for medicare and medicaid services and the internal revenue service form 990 our goal is to provide decision support to policy makers on factors that contribute to market competitiveness which has been linked to improvements in efficiency costs and access to health care we find that contributions are positively associated with market concentration this could indicate that well run np hospitals that deliver on their mission are rewarded both financially through increased contributions as well as with increased market share we also find that a higher percentage of medicare patients is positively correlated with market concentration i e reduces the competitiveness of the np market this could be explained by the fact that medicare reimbursement rates are generally lower than those paid by private insurers approximately 80 thus hospitals might not necessarily choose to operate in areas with high medicare populations further median income is negatively associated with market concentration one explanation for this effect could be the fact that a population with a higher median income is in a better position to pay for services making them attractive to hospitals as a potential market finally we find that the presence of managers with voting rights on the boards of directors has no significant impact

insurer provider networks in the medical care market i use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers i include a simple profit maximization framework and an additional effect hospitals that can secure demand without contracting with all insurers e g those most attractive to consumers and those that are capacity constrained may demand high prices that some insurers refuse to pay hospital mergers may also affect price bargaining i estimate that all three types of hospitals capture higher markups than other providers these results provide information on the hospital investment incentives generated by bargaining

a structural approach to market definition with an application to the hospital industry a structural approach to market definition market definition is essential to merger analysis because no standard approach to market definition exists opposing parties in antitrust cases often disagree about the extent of the market these differences have been particularly relevant in the hospital industry where the courts have denied seven of eight merger challenges since 1994 due largely to disagreements over geographic market definition we compare geographic markets produced using common ad hoc methodologies to a method that directly applies the ssnip test to hospitals in california using a structural model our results suggest that previously employed methods overstate hospital demand elasticities by a factor of 2 4 to 3 4 and define larger markets than would be implied by the merger guidelines s hypothetical monopolist test the use of these methods in differentiated product industries may lead to mistaken geographic market delineation and was likely a contributing factor to the permissive legal environment for hospital mergers

the effects of market structure and bargaining position on hospital prices ppos and hmos have gained widespread acceptance due in part to the belief that excess capacity and competitive market conditions can be leveraged to negotiate lower prices with health care providers we investigated prices obtained in different types of markets by the largest ppo in california our findings indicate that greater hospital competition leads to lower prices furthermore as the importance of a hospital to the ppo in an area increases the price rises substantially our testing of alternative methods for defining hospital geographic markets reveals that the common practice of using counties to define the market leads to an underestimate of the price increasing effects of a merger

the establishment level behavior of vacancies and hiring this paper is the first to study vacancies hires and vacancy yields at the establishment level in the job openings and labor turnover survey a large sample of u s employers to interpret the data we develop a simple model that identifies the flow of new vacancies and the job filling rate for vacant positions the job filling rate moves counter to aggregate employment but rises steeply with employer growth rates in the cross section it falls with employer size rises with worker turnover rates and varies by a factor of four across major industry groups we also develop evidence that the employer level hiring technology exhibits constant returns and that at the employer level and that employers rely heavily on other instruments in addition to vacancies as they vary hires we also develop evidence that effective recruiting intensity per vacancy varies over time accounting for about 41 of movements in aggregate hires in the 2007 to 2009 period our evidence and analysis provide useful inputs for assessing developing and calibrating theoretical models of search matching and hiring in the labor market

trade openness and economic growth a cross country empirical investigation abstract this paper demonstrates that trade liberalization does not have a simple and straightforward relationship with growth using a large number of openness measures for a cross section of countries over the last three decades we use two groups of trade openness measures the regression results for numerous trade intensity ratios are mostly consistent with the existing literature however contrary to the conventional view on the growth effects of trade barriers our estimation results show that trade barriers are positively and in most specifications significantly associated with growth especially for developing countries and they are consistent with the findings of theoretical growth and development literature

labor search and matching in macroeconomics abstract the labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis this paper provides a critical selective survey of the literature four fundamental questions are explored how are unemployment job vacancies and employment determined as equilibrium phenomena what determines worker flows and transition rates from one labor market state to another how are wages determined what role do labor market dynamics play in explaining business cycles and growth the survey describes the basic model reviews its theoretical extensions and discusses its empirical applications in macroeconomics the model has been developed against the background of difficulties with the use of the neo classical frictionless model of the labor market in macroeconomics its success includes the modelling of labor market outcomes as equilibrium phenomena the reasonable fit of the data and when inserted into business cycle models improved performance of more general macroeconomic models at the same time there is evidence against the nash solution used for wage setting and an active debate as to the ability of the model to account for some of the cyclical facts

crowding out or crowding in public and private investment in india abstract this paper contributes to the debate on the relationship between public and private investment in india along the following dimensions first acknowledging major structural changes that the indian economy has undergone in the past three decades we study whether public investment in recent years has become more or less complementary to private investment in comparison to the period before 1980 second we construct a novel data set of quarterly aggregate public and private investment in india over the period 1996 2015 using investment project data from the capex cmie database third embedding a theory driven long run relationship on the model we estimate a range of structural vector error correction models svecms to re examine the public and private investment relationship in india identification is achieved by decomposing shocks into those with transitory and permanent effects our results suggest that while public investment crowds out private investment in india over the period 1950 2012 the opposite is true when we restrict the sample to post 1980 or conduct a quarterly analysis since 1996 this change can likely be attributed to the policy reforms which started during the early 1980s and gained momentum after the 1991 crisis

unemployment dynamics and labour market tightness an empirical evaluation of matching function models the implications of matching function models for the relationship between labour market tightness and the transition probability into employment are summarized these implications are then tested using monthly data for three canadian provinces british columbia ontario and quebec testing methods use flexible regression techniques so as to reduce the effect of any extraneous restrictions the results show rough concordance between theoretical assumptions and empirical facts evidence of non linearity in the estimated relationships favours a search theoretic model of labour markets over one based on queues and some quantitative results offer guidance to those using calibrated search models in theoretical analysis

formation of buyer seller trade networks in a quality differentiated product market we examine the formation of buyer seller links when exchange can take place only if such a link exists sellers produce products of different qualities and multiple sellers can form a sellers association to pool their customers setting uniform prices buyers form trade links with individual sellers or sellers associations we show which buyer seller links will form and find the set of links that are stable and show how these links influence prices we also show that a trade network mismatch may occur where a high quality good remains unsold even without an economy wide excess supply of goods jel classification d40 d51 d82