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...

Voter demand for less redistribution in the face of mass migration maps into actual outcomes insofar as politicians supplying these policies respond to it. We study whether establishing new asylum-seeker centers influences redistributive outcomes in Finnish local elections - a country where...

We evaluate the causes and consequences of pre-electoral coalitions (PECs). In Finland, local elections use a proportional representation system with open lists, and parties may form joint lists. We document that PECs are more common between parties of equal size and similar ideology, and when...

This paper sheds new light on herding of institutional investors by using a unique database that identifies every transaction made by financial institutions in the German stock market. First, the analysis reveals that herding behavior of institutions occurs daily. Second, replication of the...

Recent monetary search models emphasize that the real effects of inflation via its impact on price dispersion depend on the level of search costs and, thus, on the level of market integration. For less integrated markets, the inflation-price dispersion nexus is predicted to be asymmetrically...

This paper investigates why financial market experts misperceive the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Assuming a Taylor-rule-type reaction function of the ECB, we use qualitative survey data on expectations about the future interest rate, inflation, and output to discover...

This paper uses the European Monetary Union (EMU) as a natural experiment to investigate whether more effective monetary policy reduces the persistence of inflation. Taking into account the fractional integration of inflation, we confirm that inflation dynamics differed considerably across Euro...