Waiting times for hospital care are a significant issue in the UK National Health Service. The reforms of the health service in 1990 gave a subset of family doctors (GP fundholders) both the ability to choose the hospital where their patients were treated and the means to pay for some services....

Waiting-time targets are frequently used by policy makers in the healthcare sector to monitor provider's performance. Such targets are based on the distribution of the patients on the list. We compare and link such distribution with the distribution of waiting time of the patients treated, as...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high-benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

We introduce strategic waiting in a global game setting with irreversible investment. Players can wait in order to make a better informed decision. We allow for cohort effects and discuss when they arise endogenously in technology adoption problems with positive contemporaneous network effects....

Economists long considered money illusion to be largely irrelevant. Here we show, however, that money illusion has powerful effects on equilibrium selection. If we represent pay-offs in nominal terms, choices converge to the Pareto inefficient equilibrium; however, if we lift the veil of money...

Fundamental models of money always exhibit autarkic equilibria where money has no value. In this paper we propose a simple procedure to select among equilibria in such models. Our procedure unveils a natural mapping between equilibrium behavior and the primitives of the economy, thus offering...

When two countries, starting from different quality levels reflecting different conditions of domestic market demand, open to trade, two possible equilibria arise. In the first, the quality leader maintains its position. In the second, leapfrogging occurs. The latter is possible only if the...

In the context of revived output growth and business confidence in the UK, we analyse forward guidance as a ‘coordination device’, indicating that monetary accommodation will be available for a welcome and long-awaited shift out of prolonged recession. As David Miles has emphasised, however,...