Assisting technologies aim to provide more support in the meeting of one's daily needs and the preservation of one's autonomy and quality of life. Continual developments in medicine, medical equipment, nursing and medical care are assumed to lead to new types of care being created. A high degree...

Although the economic literature on the optimal management of bank excess reserves is age-old and large, here we suggest a fresh, more practical approach based on queuing theory.

Shift to the program planning and budgeting is a budget policy priority in Russia. However, the current system of public programs development and implementation needs to be improved. The research aims at development of methodological approaches for a priori financial control of public programs...

An extensive literature has studied ambiguity aversion in economic decision making, and how ambiguity aversion can account for empirically observed violations of expected utility-based theories. Almost all relevant applied models presume a general dislike of ambiguity. In this paper, we provide...

SaniRegio is an econometric model, based on fixed effects panel techniques, that investigates the level of efficiency of Italian Regions in governing their health care systems. As a result of the model, we obtain a measure of the efficient or standardized expenditure that may be compared to the...

The paper is concerned with the efficient organization of contractual relationships between health insurers and providers. An introduction to relevant aspects of contract theory is followed by their adaptation to the characteristics of the health care system. The focus lies on an ex ante...

Within the debate about the rise of costs in the German health system, the argument has put forth that patients' excessive demand for benefits is caused by the existence of a moral hazard problem. One way of influencing an insured person's consumer behaviour is the introduction of several...

We estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) of individuals to have increased spatial access to hospitals using a spatial hedonic price model. Employing a dataset of over 90,000 detailed housing observations, we find that WTP of individuals to live one mile closer to a hospital is positive if the...

The same methodology Oecd and Ecofin apply to project future trends of health care expenditue is here applied to reconstruct backwards Italian health care expenditure. The time horizon is 1988-2012. Results are described and argued. Important evidence emerges on the historical value of the...

Investment in human development is considered a means of improving the quality of life and sustaining economic growth in the Caribbean. The purpose of this paper is to assess the efficacy of public spending on health care and education by evaluating the life expectancy and school enrolment rates...