Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...

This article uses recent survey data from the Kayes area (Western Mali) to estimate the effect of migration and remittances on the technical efficiency of agricultural households. A theoretical model is developed, which shows that the more insurance is provided by the migrants, the less...

The paper focuses on the signaling value of a tax when agents are less informed than the government on the effect of their consumption. The policy making process is analyzed as a game in which the government wants to influence consumers' behaviors through tax policy, consumers being rational and...

Using a fixed-effects panel data approach, FDI flows of 22 OECD countries are explained by gravity equations over the period 1991-2001. It is distinguished between all available observations, Intra-EU25 observations only, and observations not belonging to the EU25 area in order to control for...

We investigate the long run relationship between private consumption, disposable income and wealth approximated by equity and house price indices for a panel of 15 industrialized countries. Consumption, income and wealth are cointegrated in their common components. The impact of house prices...

This paper challenges the common view that exports generally contribute more to GDP growth than a pure change in export volume, as the export-led growth hypothesis predicts. Applying panel cointegration techniques to a production function with non-export GDP as the dependent variable, we find...

This paper explores the long run relationship between public and private investment in the euro area in terms of capital stocks and gross investment flows. Panel techniques accounting for international spillovers are employed. While private and public capital stocks are cointegrated, the...

We suggest moment estimators for the parameters of a continuous time GARCH(1,1) process based on equally spaced observations. Using the fact that the increments of the COGARCH(1,1) process are ergodic, the resulting estimators are consistent. We investigate the quality of our estimators in a...

The paper investigates Scandinavian countries and its respective male and female youth unemployment rates. Okun's law is used to estimate age-cohort and gender specific Okun coefficients to make inference on the business-cycle dependence of young people across Scandinavian countries.