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...

We employ a semi-parametric estimation approach to analyse observed and unobserved heterogeneity in the value of savings in travel time and schedule delay. Our econometric approach allows for the estimation of unobserved and observed heterogeneity in preferences in a flexible way, meaning that...

An interlock between two firms occurs if the firms share one or more directors in their boards of directors. We explore the effect of interlocks on firm performance for 101 large Dutch firms using a large and new panel database. We use five different performance measures, and for each...

Socio-economic interrelationships among regions can be measured in terms of economic flows, migration, or physical geographically-based measures, such as distance or length of shared areal unit boundaries. In general, proximity and openness tend to favour a similar economic performance among...

This paper introduces a new estimator for the fixed effects dynamic panel data model withexogenous variables. This estimator does not share some of the drawbacks of recently developed IVand GMM estimators and has a good performance even in small samples. The nearly unbiased estimatoris derived...

To study the effect of the euro on international goods trade one typically estimates a panel model for the level of trade. Trade levels increase over time, and we show that this is not fully explained by the included regressors. Because the euro is only present at the end of the sample, this may...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Regional Science</I> (2013). Volume 53, Issue 5(SI), pages 855-873.<P> This paper studies the impact of physical distance and different relational proximity types on the formation of the Internet infrastructure. Although there is some...</p></i>