GOOD HEALTH IS A CRUCIAL PART OF WELL-BEING BUT SPENDING ON HEALTH CAN BE JUSTIFIED ON ECONOMIC GROUNDS. THE GOAL OF REDUCING POVERTY PROVIDES A DIFFERENT BUT EQUALLY POWERFUL CASE FOR HEALTH INVESTMENTS. HOWEVER, IF POLICYMAKERS ARE TO ACCELERATE THE SUBSTANTIAL HEALTH GAINS OF RECENT DECADES,...

Good health is a crucial part of well-being but spending on health can be justified on economic grounds. The goal of reducing poverty provides a different but equally powerful case for health investments. However, if policymakers are to accelerate the substantial health gains of recent decades,...

This paper investigates the importance that market regulation and financial imperfections have on …rm growth. We analyse institutions affecting labor market as Employment Protection Laws (EP) and Product Market Regulation (PM). We show that together with the beneficial effects of …nancial...

Measures aimed at reducing the tax burden on labour have been advocated to alleviate the EU unemployment problem. Most of the analyses document a relationship between the unemployment rate and the tax burden on labour. Hence, it is not possible to discern whether the effect on unemployment...

The incentive contracts that managed care organizations write with physicians have generated considerable controversy. Critics fear that if informational asymmetries inhibit patients from directly assessing the quality of care provided by their physician, competition will lead to a "race to the...

Usage of health facilities in Ethiopia is among the lowest in the world; raising usage rates is probably critical for improving health outcomes. The government has diagnosed the principal problem as the lack of primary health facilities and is devoting a large share of the health budget to...

In this paper we consider a standard policy game between the Government and a union. In such a framework, we first investigate the effects of corporatism on macroeconomic performance vis-à-vis different kinds of non-co-operative equilibria. Afterwards, we introduce in the literature the issue...

The aim of this paper is to investigate both the efficacy and the stability properties of monetary policy rules in presence of heterogeneous consumers. We aim to underline the link between the well- known Taylor Principle and the demand-policy regimes, defined on the basis of the monetary policy...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

This paper proposes a simple framework for analyzing a continuum of monetary policy rules characterized by differing degrees of credibility, in which commitment and discretion become special cases of what we call quasi commitment. The monetary policy authority is assumed to formulate optimal...