The advent of information technology facilitates the geographic separation of production tasks, which is referred to as offshoring in international contexts and inshoring in domestic contexts. Although the literature on offshoring has flourished, the research regarding inshoring is limited. This...

This paper develops county-level estimates of HMO market share for all counties in the United States and uses them to examine the relationship between HMO market share and the fee for a normal office visit with an established patient charged by 2,845 fee-for-service (FFS) physicians. Two-stage...

While a fast-growing body of research has looked at how the advent and diffusion of e-commerce has affected prices, much less work has investigated e-commerce's impact on the number and type of producers operating in an industry. This paper theoretically and empirically takes up the question of...

We examine the impact of state child care regulations on the supply and quality of care in child care markets. We exploit panel data on both individual establishments and local markets to control for state, time, and, where possible, establishment-specific fixed effects to mitigate the potential...

Existing hedonic methods cannot be easily adapted to estimate willingness to pay for product characteristics when willingness to pay depends on a very large basket of goods. We show how to marry these methods with revealed preference arguments to estimate bounds on willingness to pay using data...

Service activities are now acknowledged as key players in economic development, societal change and public policy worldwide. This exciting Handbook not only contributes to ongoing conceptual debates about the nature of service-led economies and societies; it also pushes back the frontiers of...

We use a unique proprietary panel data set from a large hotel company to study how organizational form affects hotel pricing and performance. Aggregate data patterns suggest sizable performance differences between franchised and company-operated hotels. However, after controlling for other...

The share of developing countries in exports of world services increased from 15% in 2000 to 21% in 2011. Interestingly, in many of the developing economies, the growth in services exports is derived from not just traditional services, but also from modern, high-value, skill-intensive services....

Despite the fact that services have overtaken industry in terms of employment and GDP in developed countries, rigorous economic study of the service sector remains seriously neglected. The first edition of The Economics of Services initiated a redress of this oversight. Fully revised and...

Jan Owen Jansson argues that conventional economic theory is too focused on material goods markets. By making the special character of services (immaterial goods) as market objects the starting-point for the economic system analysis, a new view of the big problems of a mixed economy is offered.