We estimate the price elasticity of demand for outpatient care in Japan. We use a nationally representative microdata set consisting of nearly 440,000 Japanese patients. Using time between outpatient visits as a demand measure, we estimate a Cox proportional hazards model to calculate price...

Intergovernmental transfers are potentially important tools for aligning the goals of lower levels of government, which produce public services, with those of higher levels of government, which finance these services. This paper makes use of a unique "natural experiment" in the design of...