The paper combines the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers’ remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals. The rationale for...

This paper presents a model of financial resource curse, i.e. episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth. We study a two-sector, tradable and non-tradable, small open economy. The tradable sector is the engine of growth, and productivity growth is...

We study the mechanisms through which the adoption of the Euro delayed, rather than advanced, economic reforms in the Euro zone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional...

In this paper we distinguish different “qualities” of FDI to re-examine the relationship between FDI and growth. We use ‘quality’ to mean the effect of a unit of FDI on economic growth. However this is difficult to establish because it is a function of many different country and project...

Mental illness accounts for a massive share of the total burden of disease. Even when we include the burden of premature death mental illness accounts for 23% of the total burden of disease. Yet, despite the existence of cost-effective treatments, it receives only 13% of NHS health expenditure....

Assessing the value of new medical technologies may require new approaches that take into account a more comprehensive set of parameters than the incremental cost/QALY. It is argued that MCDA can fulfil this role and has the potential to be methodologically superior to the currently used...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification strategy takes advantage of the phased introduction of a recent set of...

This paper investigates the determinants of the prices of branded prescription medicines across different regulatory settings and health care systems, taking into account their launch date, patent status, market dynamics and the regulatory context in which they diffuse. By using volume-weighted...

One theory for why there is an education gradient in health outcomes is that more educated individuals more quickly absorb new health-related information. The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) controversy provides a case where, for a short period, some publicized research suggested that the...

The current global economic crisis is expected to produce adverse mental health effects that may increase suicide and alcohol-related death rates in affected countries. In nations with greater social safety nets, the health impacts of the economic downturn may be less pronounced. Research...