The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board administers the purchase and sale of wine and spirits across the state and is legally mandated to charge a uniform 30% markup on all products. We use an estimated discrete choice model of demand for spirits, together with information on wholesale prices, to...

A critical, but largely unexamined assumption in the debate over reform policy design, concerns the complementarity or substitutability of market competition and private ownership in increasing firm efficiency. We analyse a simple Cournot model that distinguishes two aspects of privatization...

The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue. Most empirical estimates rely on inference from non experimental data. In contrast, this paper exploits a pro-competitive policy reform to provide estimates of the impact of competition on hospital outcomes. The...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effoort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...

The literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit. Despite this, the UK government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers, arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients. We examine whether this promise is...

The present Paper investigates political constraints that may impair attempts to reform payment schemes of a given profession. When the good produced (e.g. health care) is imperfectly observable by the payer (e.g. health insurance), asymmetries of information limit the possibility to base...

The health care professions in Europe have been subject to substantial entry and conduct regulation. Most notably, pharmacies have frequently received high regulated markups over wholesale costs, and have been protected from additional competition through geographic entry restrictions. We...

This paper offers a unique quantitative evaluation of the distribution of the welfare of a water privatization experience in Mali among labor, investors, intermediate input providers, users and taxpayers. The assessment is based on indicator duality and production theory. The paper shows that...

This paper is an empirical investigation of unemployment rate series in 17 countries. The timing and size of shifts in the mean rate of unemployment are estimated. The size of the shifts and the remaining persistence in the unemployment rate series are then related to institutional differences...

Labour's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labour markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...