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...

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...

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...

Efficiency of financial markets is one of the most studied subjects in theoretical finance. Formalization of this idea is realised by the random walk model. Numerous tests have been developed to validate the hypothesis of identically and independently distributed innovations. But the results of...

Using panel data from Argentina during the 1990’s, this paper concludes that, in Argentina, income ‘mobiles’ did change over time. Among the household variables with a structural relation with income dynamics, we find university education, protecting from income declines though not...

Is the pricing of sovereign risk linear during bearish episodes? Or can initial shocks on economic fundamentals be exacerbated by endogenous factors that create nonlinearities? We test for nonlinearities in the sovereign bond market of European peripheral countries during the debt crisis and...

This paper estimates the causal impact of retirement among the 50-69 year-old on Body Mass Index (BMI), the probability of being either overweight or obese and the probability of being obese. Based on the 2004, 2006 and 2010-11 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe...

This paper examines whether general practitionersí(GPsí) earnings are high enough to keep this profession attractive. We set up two samples, with longitudinal data relative to GPs and executives. Those two professions have similar abilities but GPs have chosen a longer education. To measure if...

Human capital is considered as one of the main inputs in economic growth. Human capital can generate endogenous growth thanks to a continuous process of knowledge and externalities accumulation (Aghion and Howitt, 1998). In that context, this paper explores the relationship between innovation...