inequality and polarisation in health systems responsiveness a cross country analysis the world health report 2000 proposed three fundamental goals for health systems encompassing population health health care finance and health systems responsiveness the goals incorporate both an efficiency and equity dimension while inequalities in population health and health care finance have motivated two important strands of research inequalities in responsiveness have received less attention in health economics this paper examines inequality and polarisation in responsiveness bridging this gap in the literature and contributing towards an integrated analysis of health systems performance it uses data from the world health survey to measure and compare inequalities in responsiveness across 25 european countries in order to respect the inherently ordinal nature of the responsiveness data median based measures of inequality and polarisation are employed the results suggest that in the face of wide differences in the health systems analysed there exists large variability in inequality in responsiveness across countries

deforestation and optimal management in a general discrete time model of optimal forest management where land may be diverted to alternative use and stocks of standing trees may yield flow benefits we investigate the economic and ecological conditions under which optimal paths lead to total deforestation i e complete long term removal of forest cover we show that if deforestation occurs from some initial state then it must occur in finite time along every optimal path so that zero forest cover is the globally stable optimal steady state we develop a condition that is both necessary and sufficient for deforestation deforestation is less likely if the immediate profitability of timber harvest the benefits from stocks of standing forests and the timber content of trees are higher we characterize the minimum forest cover along optimal paths when deforestation is not optimal we design a simple linear subsidy on standing forest biomass that can motivate a private owner who does not take into account the external benefits from standing trees to conserve forests

on the economically optimal exploitation of a renewable resource the case of a convex environment and a convex return function we investigate optimal policies for the exploitation of a renewable resource subject to a concave growth function and a convex return function we prove an important result on the elasticity of the objective function and apply it to give a characterization of the optimal harvesting paths in this class of models in particular we derive conditions such that all optimal programs converge to a fixed point or to a cycle of finite period and hence result in the conservation of the resource we also show which assumptions guarantee that extinction of the stock is optimal that nonconvex preferences or technologies cause problems for economic theory is well known as our model can formally be interpreted as an optimal growth model with nonconcave utility function our results are a further contribution on the dynamics of optimal paths in the general class of economic models with nonconcavities journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c61 e32 q20

the harvesting decisions when a standing forest with multiple age classes has value a solution is demonstrated to an infinite horizon discrete time utility model describing the consumption and cutting behavior of a nonindustrial private landowner who is managing a multiple age class forest and who values both consumption derived from harvesting the trees and amenity derived from the standing trees a policy rule is derived to attain a normal forest from any initial age class distribution it is demonstrated that a noncyclical forest allowing a constant periodic harvest is typically not a normal forest therefore an even flow timber harvesting is not tied to the existence of a normal forest forest economics literature has a long tradition of looking at the optimal management of one single stand this tradition goes back to faustmann s work in the nineteenth century faustmann however a characteristic feature in forest management is the existence of and possible interdependencies between multiple age classes stands these interdependencies become especially difficult to ignore when one is dealing with multiple use forest management problems forest economics literature recognizing the feature of multiple stands has two main strains one has been interested in landowner timber and nontimber decisions in the presence of spatial interactions of two or more adjacent stands swallow and wear swallow talukdar and wear koskela and ollikainen the other has incorporated stand or age class dynamics into models describing landowner or timber market behavior this latter literature has modeled optimal behavior either based on timber benefits berck 1976 berck 1979 johansson and l ofgren lyon and sedjo sedjo and lyon mitra and wan 1985 mitra and wan 1986 salo and tahvonen 2002 2003 sohngen mendelsohn and sedjo or both

vintage technologies and skill constraints evidence from u s exports of new and used machines when countries import production machinery they must choose between new and used equipment this article looks at that choice in the presence of labor saving technical progress and complementarity between technologies and skills within the firm it develops a theoretical model of the market for used machines it then analyzes data on united states u s exports of metalworking machine tools by country of destination classifying machines according to their vintage and their technological characteristics the data show that the share of used equipment imported is higher if the importing country has a lower level of development as measured by income per capita econometric estimation of the determinants of this share shows that it also is higher the greater is the technological change embodied in the machine or the greater is the change in the skills required to run the machine efficiently these results indicate that technological factors and skill constraints may be as important as factor prices in determining the choice of technique in developing countries the policy recommendation emerging from this work avoid constraints on imports of used equipment is similar to that in the existing literature but the reasoning is different instead of emphasizing inappropriate capital labor ratios for low wage countries the results indicate that investment in advanced technologies is effective only if importing countries have the skills to use them

optimal forest rotation under monopoly and competition abstract the two main propositions of the paper establish sufficient conditions for the optimal rotation to be invariant to market structure whether monopolistic competitive or maximizing the temporal sum of consumer s surpluses a corollary to the second proposition yields sufficient conditions for the monopolistic rotation to be actually longer than the competitive one

elicitation format and sensitivity to scope this paper undertakes a systematiccomparison of the contingent valuation cv andchoice experiments ce methods andinvestigates the extent to which either of themare affected by insensitivity to scope this isachieved by undertaking separate cv estimatesof willingness to pay for two nested publicgoods both of which are explicitly included ina parallel ce survey the results indicate thatce values exhibit greater sensitivity to scopethan cv values ce gives significantly largerresults than cv for the more inclusive publicgood and significantly smaller results for theless inclusive public good

equity in the finance of health care some international comparisons this paper presents the results of a ten country comparative study of health care financing systems and their progressivity characteristics it distinguishes between the tax financed systems of denmark portugal and the u k the social insurance systems of france the netherlands and spain and the predominantly private systems of switzerland and the u s it concludes that tax financed systems tend to be proportional or mildly progressive that social insurance systems are regressive and that private systems are even more regressive out of pocket payments are in most countries an especially regressive means of raising health care revenues

some theoretical results on the economics of forestry pose the value of timber from a tree is related to its age a according to a function ft and a discount rate of p 0 is given at what age should a tree or a stand of trees of the same vintage be cut down to maximize the present value of the timber content the answer to this question proposed by jevons 1871 wicksell 1911 and others can be stated as follows cut the tree at an age at which the increase in value of timber content of the standing tree over an additional unit time interval equals the interest that can be earned over an additional unit time interval if the revenue from cutting the tree is invested at an interest rate p from the point of view of the economics of forestry the above solution and indeed the above question is missing something more precisely the solution is based on the assumption that the land on which the stand of trees was growing is not used after the trees are cut down consequently it fails to encompass an important aspect of the forest rotation problem once trees are removed from a given area the land is available for new forest growth clearly the longer the felling of the existing forest is delayed the longer it takes to acquire revenues from future harvests the opportunity cost of utilizing the forest site for the existing stand of trees must be considered taking this reforestation aspect into account faustmann 1849 noted that the question to be asked is the following assuming that one had an empty tract of land and one were interested in maximizing the discounted sum of the value of timber content of trees harvested timber being evaluated at a constant price what pattern of planting and harvesting trees should one follow

environmental policy and growth when inputs are differentiated in pollution intensity environmental policy affects the distribution of market shares if intermediate goods are differentiated in their pollution intensity when innovations are environment friendly a tax on emissions skews demand towards new goods which are the most productive in this case the tax has to increase along a balanced growth path to keep the market shares of goods of different vintages constant comparing balanced growth paths we find that tightening the policy stance spurs innovation because it increases the market share of recent vintages and promotes environment friendly technological progress as a result the cost of environmental policy in terms of slower growth is weaker

reliability of individual valuations of public and private goods choice consistency response time and preference refinement we examined the reliability of a large set of paired comparison value judgments involving public goods private goods and sums of money as respondents progressed through a random sequence of paired choices they were each given their response time decreased and they became more consistent apparently fine tuning their responses suggesting that respondents tend to begin a hypothetical value exercise with relatively imprecise preferences and that experience in expressing preference helps reduce that imprecision reliability was greater for private than for public good choices and greater for choices between a good and a monetary amount than for choices between two goods however the reliability for public good choices was only slightly lower than for the private goods published by elsevier b v

assessing energy price induced improvements in efficiency of capital in oecd manufacturing industries to assess how capital stocks adapt to energy price changes it is necessary to account for the impacts on different vintages of capital and to account separately for price induced and autonomous improvements in the energy efficiency of capital stock the results of econometric analysis for five manufacturing industries in 19 oecd countries between 1990 and 2005 indicate that higher energy prices resulted in smaller energy use due to both improved energy efficiency of capital stock and reduced demand for the energy input the investment response to energy prices varied considerably across manufacturing industries being more significant in energy intensive sectors the results of policy simulations indicate that a carbon tax can deliver significant reductions in energy consumption in the medium run with modest declines in energy using capital stock

on the economics of forest vintages abstract we study optimal harvesting of a multiple vintage forest system under discounting discrete time and strictly concave utility it is shown that at the optimal stationary state timber harvest may evolve cyclically over time the cycles occur because in the forest vintage model space is measured continuously and time in discrete units cycles disappear as period length moves toward zero when the faustmann rotation is not unique or when the discount factor approaches unity we develop an equivalent model that can be used to solve the vintage problem numerically from any initial state numerical examples suggest that the optimal solution converges to the stationary cycle from any initial vintage structure

endogenous growth and time to build the ak case abstract in this paper a continuous time ak model is fully analyzed under the time to build assumption the existence and uniqueness of a real balanced growth path as well as oscillatory convergence are proved transversality conditions and capital depreciation are highlighted moreover it has been shown how the introduction of the time to build assumption supports some interesting empirical evidences such as the negative link between mean output growth and output growth volatility finally numerical simulations are provided for different choices of the time to build delay in order to clarify the analytical results

technology shocks and job flows we consider a version of the solow growth model where technological progress can be investment specific or investment neutral the labour market is subject to search frictions and the existing productive units may fail to adopt the most recent technological advances technological progress can lead to the destruction of technologically obsolete jobs and cause unemployment we calibrate the model to replicate the high persistence that characterizes the dynamics of firms neutral technology and the frequency of firms capital adjustment we find that neutral technological advances increase job destruction and job reallocation and reduce aggregate employment investment specific technological advances reduce job destruction have mild effects on job creation and are expansionary hence neutral technological progress prompts schumpeterian creative destruction while investment specific technological progress operates essentially as in the standard neoclassical growth model using structural var models we provide support to the key dynamic implications of the model copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

the politics of redistributive social insurance this paper analyses the political support for a social insurance that includes elements of redistribution when there exists an imperfect private insurance alternative individuals differ both in their income and risk the social insurance is compulsory and charges an income related contribution with pooling of risks the private insurance is voluntary and charges a contribution based on individual risks however due to the adverse selection problem private insurance companies provide only partial insurance adopting a non expected utility model we show that there is a general majority support for social insurance and that this support is increasing with risk aversion we also show that a mixed insurance is politically impossible regardless of the degree of redistribution of social insurance and the joint distribution of risk and income in the population lastly we analyse how the political support for social insurance is affected by any change in its redistributive component and the possibility of using genetic tests

who pays for health care in asia we estimate the distributional incidence of health care financing in 13 asian territories that account for 55 of the asian population in all territories higher income households contribute more to the financing of health care the better off contribute more as a proportion of ability to pay in most low and lower middle income territories health care financing is slightly regressive in three high income economies with universal social insurance direct taxation is the most progressive source of finance and is most so in poorer economies in universal systems social insurance is proportional to regressive in high income economies the out of pocket oop payments are proportional or regressive while in low income economies the better off spend relatively more oop but in most low middle income countries the better off not only pay more they also get more health care

the redistributive effect of health care finance in twelve oecd countries the oecd countries finance their health care through a mixture of taxes social insurance contributions private insurance premiums and out of pocket payments the various payment sources have very different implications for both vertical and horizontal equity and on redistributive effect which is a function of both this paper presents results on the income redistribution consequences of the health care financing mixes adopted in twelve oecd countries by decomposing the overall income redistributive effect into a progressivity horizontal inequity and reranking component the general finding of this study is that the vertical effect is much more important than horizontal inequity and reranking in determining the overall redistributive effect but that their relative importance varies by source of payment public finance sources tend to have small positive redistributive effects and less differential treatment while private financing sources generally have larger negative redistributive effects which are to a substantial degree caused by differential treatment

forestry and the bequest motive abstract with an overlapping generations model for trees and humans it is shown that in a small open timber producing economy both in a setting where the economy is planned in order to maximize an intertemporal social welfare function and in a decentralized market economy long term forest investments should be evaluated by their net present value this is so provided that the existing generation has some if even very small concern for the well being of the next generation a review of empirical studies among nonindustrial private forest owners in the u s and in sweden gives support to the suggestion that this mechanism based on a tinge of altruism may be more important in promoting long term silvicultural investments than the incentives given by existing land markets

the dynamics of technological unemployment this article compares the short and long run effects of technological progress on employment it presents a simple model of frictional unemployment capturing the negative creative destruction effects of technological change on employment in the long run faster technological change accelerates job obsolescence which reduces the equilibrium level of employment but it is also shown to have short run positive and potentially important effects on employment this tends to partially reconcile the schumpeterian view of the effects of technological change on labor markets with facts such as the response of most oecd unemployment rates to the 1970s productivity slowdown

on the faustmann solution to the forest management problem abstract this paper is concerned with optimal solutions to the forest management problem when future utilities are undiscounted by examining asymptotic properties of such solutions we find that i if the utility function is linear then the faustmann periodic solution is optimal ii if the utility function is increasing and strictly concave an optimal solution converges to the maximum sustained yield solution which we characterize as a golden rule these results may be viewed as a possible resolution to the debate in forestry economics about what constitutes an optimal policy in forest management

classical turnpike theory and the economics of forestry classical turnpike theory as originally conceived by samuelson pertains to optimal growth theory over a large but finite time horizon with given initial and terminal stocks in this paper we present two turnpike results in the context of the economics of forestry with given initial and terminal forest configurations our results depart from the general theory in that they concern a transitional production set which does not satisfy the assumptions of inaction and free disposal and rely on a recently discovered non interiority assumption on concave not necessarily differentiable benefit functions that implies and is implied by the asymptotic convergence of good programs

optimal forestry control with variable forest area abstract this paper investigates the optimal forestry control problem when the forest area is variable a forester is considered who is endowed with effectively infinite area of land and whose objective is to maximize the discounted value of profit by controlling his planting and harvesting rates under a convex cost function necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality are established the uniqueness of the solution is examined changes in the timber price are shown to have possibly no effect upon the optimal steady state harvesting age but upon the forest area a case exhibiting monotonic convergence of the optimal paths is provided

disentangling the pure time effect from site and preference heterogeneity effects in benefit transfer an empirical investigation of transferability two identical open ended contingent valuation surveys assessing willingness to pay for better protection against flooding were administered in 2005 and 2010 at the same site the 2010 survey was administered to the same respondents as those interviewed in 2005 as well as to new participants this experimental design allows us to separate the pure temporal dimension from the spatial and social dimensions of transferability thereby permitting an investigation of the temporal reliability associated with a transfer of value estimates over a 5 year time horizon having isolated the pure effect of time the design further allows assessing the social dimension of transferability

choice certainty and consistency in repeated choice experiments the main objective of this study is to examine how repeated choice affects preference learning in stated preference experiments we test different hypotheses related to preference learning by analyzing response patterns and asking respondents in a choice experiment to report their experienced certainty when going through the choice tasks in a split sample test we show that follow up choice certainty questions are procedural invariant the self reported certainty results indicate that learning occurs but econometric testing procedures do not identify any significant impact of learning effects on parameter estimates or variance across choice tasks additional tests of choice consistency suggest that preferences in the choice experiment are stable and coherent

complexity effects in choice experiment based models abstract many firms rely on choice experiment based models to evaluate future marketing actions under various market conditions this research investigates choice complexity i e number of alternatives number of attributes and utility similarity between the most attractive alternatives and individual differences in decision time as key factors that affect the predictive performance of models based on choice experiments both within and between complexity conditions the results show that complexity and individual decision time not only affect the error in consumer choice models but also consumers decision strategy and systematic utilities the authors introduce a complexity adjusted mixed logit cam logit model to capture the various influences of complexity in choice experiment based models they illustrate the consequences of complexity on choice behavior with market share predictions of the cam logit model for different complexity conditions

equity during an economic crisis financing of the argentine health system this article analyses the redistributive effect caused by health financing and the distribution of healthcare utilization in argentina before and during the severe 2001 2002 economic crisis both dramatically changed during this period the redistributive effect became much more positive and utilization shifted from pro poor to pro rich this clearly demonstrates that when utilization is contingent on financing changes can occur rapidly and that an integrated approach is required when monitoring equity from a policy perspective the argentine health system appears vulnerable to economic downturns mainly due to high reliance on out of pocket payments and the strong link between health insurance and employment

unfair inequalities in health and health care inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors measuring unfair inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading to ethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimate inequalities an example of the former could be life style choices an example of the latter is social background we show how to derive measures of unfair inequalities in health and in health care delivery from a structural model of health care and health production direct unfairness linked to the variations in medical expenditures and health in the hypothetical distribution in which all legitimate sources of variation are kept constant fairness gap linked to the differences between the actual distribution and the hypothetical distribution in which all illegitimate sources of variation have been removed these two approaches are related to the theory of fair allocation in general they lead to different results we propose to analyse the resulting distributions with the traditional apparatus of lorenz curves and inequality measures we compare our proposal to the more common approach using concentration curves and analyse the relationship with the methods of direct and indirect standardization we discuss how inequalities in health care can be integrated in an overall evaluation of social inequality

choice consistency and preference stability in test retests of discrete choice experiment and open ended willingness to pay elicitation formats this study tests the temporal stability of preferences choices and willingness to pay wtp values using both discrete choice experiment dce and open ended oe wtp elicitation formats the same sample is surveyed three times over the course of two years using each time the same choice sets choice consistency is positively correlated with choice certainty and choice complexity the impact of choice complexity fades away in time most likely as a result of learning and preference refinement although the oe wtp values remain stable over a time period of 2 years as in previous stated preference studies dce based wtp measures differ significantly suggesting their use in benefits transfer may be limited

the distributional impact of health financing in europe a review this article summarises extends and updates previous empirical work on the distributional implications of alternative health care financing arrangements in a selection of european countries and the us on the one hand total health care payments are almost proportional to ability to pay in most countries this is predominantly driven by a high reliance on public financing on the other hand private payments out of pocket payments as well as private insurance premiums are highly regressive more extended reliance on private financing may therefore endanger the equitable nature of financing systems in addition private payments put a heavy burden on unfortunate households

redistribution effect and unequal income tax treatment decomposing the post tax gini coefficient across groups of pre tax equals reveals the separate contributions to the redistributive effect of an income tax of 1 the effective schedule the vertical effect 2 the unequal treatment of equals arising from departures from this effective schedule the horizontal effect and 3 the reranking of unequals as a result of such departures the reranking effect the methodology is applied to u k microdata throughout the period 1978 91 reranking understates the negative contribution to redistributive effect of unequal tax treatment by about one third and is far outweighed by the vertical effect copyright 1994 by royal economic society

vintage capital investment and growth abstract we study the dynamics of growth and investment in a continuous time model with vintage capital vintage capital models may be characterized by non exponential rates of depreciation and technical change and can incorporate gestation lags as well as learning by using we investigate the effect of such features on the dynamics of investment and growth and show how they can contribute to explaining the volatile nature of investment time series

designing discrete choice experiments do optimal designs come at a price in discrete choice experiments design decisions are crucial for determining data quality and costs while high statistical efficiency designs are desirable they may come at a price if they increase the cognitive burden for respondents we address this problem by designing 44 experiments that systematically vary numbers of attributes and attribute level differences our results for two product categories suggest that respondents systematically are less consistent in answering choice questions as statistical efficiency increases this relationship holds regardless of the number of attributes and is statistically significant even if one accommodates preference heterogeneity implications for practice and future research are discussed

statistical inference of progressivity dominance an application to health care financing distributions this paper employs a distribution free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on finnish data in distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement the difference between the lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxes and payments is used to evaluate progressivity dominance and changes in progressivity sample weights are applied to account for the effect of sampling design and non response the analysis demonstrates that the dominance approach can be successfully applied to various types of distributional problems besides comparisons concerning differences in income distributions as an empirical application the paper presents estimation results for the progressivity of various health care financing sources using data from the 1987 and 1996 finnish health care surveys

optimal forest rotation and land values under a borrowing constraint abstract this study relaxes the assumption of perfect capital markets in the classical faustmann forest rotation model a constraint on borrowing changes all the basic properties of optimal forest harvesting instead of a constant rotation period an infinite chain of rotations is determined by a nonlinear difference equation the rotation period evolves over time and approaches a stationary rotation in finite or infinite time the length of optimal rotation timber supply and the value of forest land depend on forest owner specific factors that are normally nonexistent in rotation problems the model explains several empirical findings that cause problems for the classical versions of the faustmann model

on equilibrium cycles and normal forests in optimal harvesting of tree vintages abstract a normal forest that has an even land allocation between tree vintages has traditionally been taken as a desirable long run goal in forestry in contrast the presently favored economic hypothesis suggests that under positive discounting the optimal forest vintage structure typically evolves to a cycle without convergence toward the normal forest this paper proves the existence of the cyclical solution and its global stability properties using elementary methods the occurrence of cycles in forest harvesting is given a resource economics interpretation a numerical example that was previously analyzed incorrectly is clarified in the existing vintage model forest land has no competing uses in an extension with competitive land use the stationary cycles are shown to be replaced by a saddle point path with damped oscillations and convergence toward the normal forest

choice modelling approaches a superior alternative for environmental valuation in this paper we examine some popular choice modelling approaches to environmental valuation which can be considered as alternatives to more familiar valuation techniques based on stated preferences such as the contingent valuation method a number of choice modelling methods are consistent with consumer theory and its focus on an attribute based theory of value permits a superior representation of many environmental management contexts however choice modelling surveys can place a severe cognitive burden upon respondents and induce satisficing rather than maximising behavioural patterns in this framework we seek to identify the best available choice modelling alternative and investigate its potential to solve some of the major biases associated with standard contingent valuation we then discuss its use in the light of policy appraisal needs within the eu an application to the demand for rock climbing in scotland is provided as an illustration

renewable resources with endogenous age classes and allocation of land it is shown that if it is optimal to allocate all land to forestry the long run stationary state is a cyclical solution around an equilibrium with an even timber flow the equilibrium cycles vanish when it is optimal to allocate some fraction of land outside forestry we present numerical examples on the transitional dynamics and long and short run timber supply when land conversion is costly the cycles do not vanish and the long run equilibrium between forestry and agriculture is represented by a continuum

survey response related biases in contingent valuation concepts remedies and empirical application to valuing aquatic plant management s mple nonresponse and selection biases that may occur in survey research such as contingent valu tion applications are discussed and tested correction mechanisms for these types of biases are d monstrated results indicate the importance of testing and correcting for unit and item nonresp nse bias in contingent valuation survey data when sample nonresponse and selection bias go u

assessing equitable health financing for universal health coverage a case study of south africa abstractthis article argues that an assessment of progressivity over time can provide an indication of progress towards a more progressive or a less regressive health financing system and can be useful to policymakers it introduces a framework to characterize shifts in progressivity in health financing between two time periods using the popularly known kakwani index of progressivity and other associated indices it also decomposes the shifts in progressivity into the relative contributions of the changes in income distribution and the changes in the distribution of health payments further it proposes graphics that statistically analyses how the shifts in progressivity vary along the distribution of income a pro poor pro rich shift implies that the health financing mechanism is becoming more less progressive or less more regressive between two time periods a proportional shift means that progressivity is constant between the two periods this framework is applied to nationally represen

optimal forest rotation with in situ preferences abstract this study develops a utility maximization infinite horizon forest rotation model that includesin situvalues and the forest owner s consumption savings decision making the value of forest land becomes owner specific and depends on property rights related toin situbenefits the length of the rotation period depends e g on the wealth of the forest owner and may evolve in time a forest owner with accumulating nonforest assets never continues harvesting forever in contrast with decreasing nonforest assets the rotation period converges toward the faustmann solution in a multiple stand version of the model the harvesting decisions regarding different stands are linked together via the budget constraint and the dependence of an individual stand sin situvalue on the age structure of the whole forest numerical simulation with two stands suggests that within the class of concavein situvaluation functions the optimal solution yields convergence toward forests with increasing heterogeneity of age structures

testing for temporal reliability in contingent valuation with time for changes in factors affecting demand we develop a temporal reliability test of the contingent valuation method separate random samples were administered the same telephone survey five years apart in the retest respondents have less favorable attitudes toward the environment given this result a temporally reliable contingent valuation would find lower willingness to pay we find that the estimates are temporally reliable after accounting for attitudes which have changed over the five year period values are not significantly different five years apart this study provides additional evidence that use of the contingent valuation method can provide useful information for environmental policy analysis

a conceptual framework for community based health insurance in low income countries social capital and economic development summary the international policy model linking community based health insurance cbhi and universal coverage for health care in low income countries is implicitly determined by the development of mutual health insurance in 19th century europe and japan the economic and health system frameworks employed in cbhi policy have not sufficiently taken into account contextual considerations social capital theories could contribute to understanding why generally cbhi does not achieve significant and sustainable levels of population coverage a framework of social capital and economic development is used to organize and interpret existing evidence on cbhi this suggests that solidarity trust extra community networks vertical civil society links and state society relations affect the success of cbhi aligning schemes to social determinants of cbhi could result in structures that differ from those proposed by current analytic frameworks

anticipation effects of technological progress on capital accumulation a vintage capital approach abstract due to embodied technological progress new generations of capital goods are more productive therefore in order to study the effects of technological progress a model must be analyzed in which different generations of capital goods can be distinguished we determine in what way the firm adjusts current investments to predictions of technological progress in the presence of market power we show that a negative anticipation effect occurs i e current investments in recent generations of capital goods decline when faster technological progress will take place in the future because then it becomes more attractive to wait for new generations of capital goods in case that only investments in new machines are possible actually a whole wave of anticipation phases arises

the economics of orchards an exercise in point input flow output capital theory abstract this paper is concerned with the qualitative properties of optimal intertemporal programs in a model of point input flow output capital theory when future utilities are discounted under a mild condition on the flow output vector we establish that optimal programs for every discount factor and every initial state other than a unique stationary optimal state will exhibit non convergence furthermore we provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the flow output vector for which a neighborhood turnpike theorem holds that is long run fluctuations on an optimal program are small when the discount factor is close to unity

on the interplay between speculative bubbles and productive investment the aim of this paper is to study the interplay between long term productive investments and more short term and liquid speculative ones a three period lived overlapping generations model allows us to make this distinction agents have a portfolio decision when young they can invest in human capital that is a productive long term investment that provides a return during the following two periods when young or in the middle age they can invest in a bubble young individuals can also borrow on a credit market to finance the productive investment however the amount borrowed is limited by a credit constraint we show that the existence of a stationary bubble raises productive investment and production when the bubleless economy is credit constrained and dynamically efficient indeed young agents sell short the bubble to increase productive investments whereas traders at middle age transfer wealth to old age the bubble allows to relax the credit constraint we outline that a permanent technological shock inducing either a larger return of capital in the short term or a similar increase in the return of capital in both periods raises productive capital production and the bubble size we use our framework to discuss the effect on the occurrence of bubbles of financial regulation and fiscal policy

on the elasticities of harvesting rules abstract in this paper we rank the relative importance of the exogenous parameters upon the optimal harvesting size in a stochastic rotation problem we show that when the tree growth follows geometric brownian motion the harvesting size is most elastic to the harvesting cost followed by the interest rate and is least elastic to the parameters of tree growth similar ranking holds for the linear growth case in both cases the harvesting size is increasing and concave in the harvesting cost bounded between two parallel lines the harvesting decision is made according to a stochastic extension of the faustmann formula

threshold nonlinearities and asymmetric endogenous business cycles abstract this paper presents a model of endogenous business cycles in the presence of knowledge spillovers and a time to build restriction there are two key assumptions that characterize the model i the payoff to each firm depends on the aggregate state of knowledge and ii the innovation of a project is time consuming under those assumptions a simple structure is shown to be described by a piecewise linear difference equation with a discontinuity we show that the resulting dynamics generated by such a dynamical system leads to an asymmetric periodic cycle of arbitrary period that appears to switch repeatedly between different regimes

dynamic learning and context dependence in sequential attribute based stated preference valuation questions a hybrid stated preference model is presented that combines the referendum contingent valuation response format with an experimentally designed set of attributes a sequence of valuation questions is asked to a random sample in a mailout mail back format econometric analysis shows greater discrimination between alternatives in the final choice in the sequence and the vector of preference parameters shifts lead and lag choice sets have a structural influence on current choices and unobserved factors induce positive correlation across the responses these results indicate that people learn about their preferences for attributebased environmental goods by comparing attribute levels across choice sets

the influence of task complexity on consumer choice a latent class model of decision strategy switching the literature indicating that person context and task specific factors cause consumers to utilize different decision strategies has generally failed to affect the specification of choice models used by practitioners and academics alike who still tend to assume an utility maximizing omniscient indefatigable consumer this article 1 introduces decision strategy selection within a maintained compensatory framework into aggregate choice models via latent classes which arise because of task complexity 2 it demonstrates that within an experimental choice task the model reflects changing aggregate preferences as choice complexity changes and as the task progresses the import of these findings for current practice model interpretation and future research needs is examined

designing choice sets for stated preference methods the effects of complexity on choice consistency abstract we vary the complexity of choice sets used in stated preference methods to evaluate the impact on choice consistency we define five measures of complexity that capture either the amount of information or the correlational structure of information in a choice set using these measures as randomly assigned treatments in a large experiment we analyze the consistency of respondents choices using a heteroskedastic multinomial logit model we find that i all of our measures of choice set complexity affect choice consistency ii changes in the correlational structure of information have the largest impact on choice consistency and iii choice complexity significantly distorts welfare estimates our results confirm economists initial worry that moving from contingent valuation to conjoint methods will increase complexity induced choice inconsistency however our analysis also shows that these negative impacts may be mitigated if precautions are taken at the design and estimation stages of stated preference methods

do stated preference methods stand the test of time a test of the stability of contingent values and models for health risks when facing an extreme event abstract this paper focuses on the temporal stability of dichotomous choice dc contingent values and models and the implication of time related aspects for benefits transfer as a viable valuation method from a practical point of view time plays an important role in benefits transfer results are used from studies often carried out years ago and the obvious question is to what extent the estimated values and models stand the test of time in the case of value function transfer this implies testing the robustness of the estimated coefficient estimates over time the novelty of the temporal stability work presented here is that two identical dc contingent valuation cv studies of the health risks associated with bathing water quality were carried out before and during extreme weather conditions causing the closure of bathing locations for public health reasons differences in contingent values and models before and during the extreme event are tested the extreme event causes the seasonal good in question to become temporarily scarcer and marginal wtp is therefore expected to be higher during the extreme event than before but not that underlying preferences have changed hence basically two things are tested the effect of time on stated preferences for a seasonal good and the effect of the extreme event on these preferences wtp values before and during the event appear to be robust also when accounting for substitution effects the results before and during the extreme event remain transferable when accounting for theoretically expected factors in a simple multivariate transfer model however when introducing additional and contextual ad hoc factors in the model the estimated models and their random components become significantly different and hence not transferable suggesting that unobserved preferences may not have been randomly distributed across the two surveys after all

test retest reliability of choice experiments in environmental valuation the paper presents the results of the first test retest study on choice experiments in environmental valuation in a survey concerning landscape externalities of onshore wind power in central germany respondents answered the same five choice sets at two different points in time each choice set comprised three alternatives described by five attributes and the time interval between the test and the retest was eleven months the analysis takes place at three different levels investigating choice consistency at the choice task level and repeatability of the latent construct utility at the level of parametric models as well as at the level of willingness to pay estimates at the choice task level we observed 59 identical choices the parametric analysis shows that the test and retest estimates are not equal even when we control for scale that is differences in the error variance however comparing the marginal willingness to pay estimates among test and retest reveals only a statistically significant difference for one of the attributes overall this indicates a moderate test retest reliability taking into account that consistency at the choice task level overlooks the stochastic nature of the process underlying discrete choice experiments

equity in the finance of health care some further international comparisons this paper presents further international comparisons of progressivity of health care financing systems the paper builds on the work of wagstaff et al wagstaff a van doorslaer e et al 1992 equity in the finance of health care some international comparisons journal of health economics 11 pp 361 387 but extends it in a number of directions we modify the methodology used there and achieve a higher degree of cross country comparability in variable definitions we update and extend the cross section of countries and we present evidence on trends in financing mixes and progressivity

bequests credit rationing and in situ values in the faustmann pressler ohlin forestry model the problem of determining the optimal time to stop the pure aging process has a 150 year history in forestry the success of the rotation model lies in the fact that it is taken to be theoretically sound empirically testable and has clear practical relevance nonetheless empirical findings show that timber supply depends on variables missing from the original formulation previous research has addressed the problem by abandoning the pure aging description of forests this study demonstrates that the optimal aging process becomes forest owner specific under imperfect land and capital markets and if the owner has in situ preferences

europe and central asia s great post communist social health insurance experiment aggregate impacts on health sector outcomes abstract the post communist transition to social health insurance in many of the central and eastern european and central asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax financed health systems this paper employs regression based generalizations of the difference in differences method on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990 2004 we find that controlling for any concurrent provider payment reforms adoption of social health insurance increased national health spending and hospital activity rates but did not lead to better health outcomes

progressivity horizontal inequality and reranking caused by health system financing a decomposition analysis for switzerland abstract this paper presents an application of the duclos et al duclos j y jalbert v araar a 2003 classical horizontal inequity and reranking an integrated approach research on economic inequality 10 65 100 decomposition to an analysis of the 1998 swiss health system financing we see that in addition to measuring horizontal inequality in the classical sense this decomposition is more efficient and flexible than earlier ones it is also pointed out that methods involving a nonparametric estimation lead to asymptotically biased vertical and horizontal effects a procedure to estimate this bias is given finally it is shown that despite a major reform health system financing is still very regressive and social health insurance is more regressive than direct financing

endogenous vs exogenously driven fluctuations in vintage capital models in this paper we present a particular case of the creative destruction model of caballero and hammour quart j econ 111 1996 805 851 in which both exogenous and endogenous fluctuation sources are present we show that job creation follows a delayed differential equation with periodic coefficients the delay is equal to the optimal age of capital goods the period of the coefficients is equal to the period of an exogenous profitability cycle we mathematically show that job creation is asymptotically periodic with the same period as the profitability cycle furthermore using an explicit numerical method we find that replacement echoes generally dominate the short run dynamics finally we find that the combination of the two fluctuations sources favors the appearance of asymmetries in job creation and job destruction patterns