The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent systems from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the quality level of their examination processes....

We analyze the determinants of the demand for social, private and self-insurance for long-term care in an environment where agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Uniform social benefits are financed with a proportional income tax and are thus...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of privatization in a mixed duopoly, where a private firm competes in quantities with a welfare-maximizing public firm. We consider two inefficiencies of the public sector: a possible cost inefficiency, and an allocative inefficiency due to...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the implications of increased student mobility on the level of education provided after opening the borders between two similar countries. As a preliminary result, it will be shown that some public provision of mandatory education can be welfare improving...

In this paper we consider the problem of financing infrastructure when the regulator faces a budget constraint. The optimal budget-constrained mechanism satisfies four properties. The first property is bunching at the top, that is the more efficient firms produce the same quantity irrespective...

In most democracies, the majority of education expenditures is financed by the government. In non-democracies, we observe a wide variation in the mix of public and private funding of education. In addition, countries with high inequality tend to rely more heavily on private schooling. We develop...

This paper shows that the diverging results obtained in the literature on the firm size-growth relationship can be reconciled in a very general theoretical framework featuring firm-level heterogeneity and investment decision. Three main elements determine the nature and the intensity of the...

In a paper published by Ma (1994) it was argued that the prospective payment system in the hospital industry was superior to the cost based reimbursement system to achieve both cost reduction and quality improvement ob jectives. In the analysis, it was assumed that quality and costs decisions...

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. Comparing the cumulative distributions of the measures of...