We study the relationship between interchange fees and card transactions in a large panel of countries and assess the impact of the Interchange Fee Regulation, introduced in 2015 in the European Union, on card usage. For our purposes, we take advantage of a newly assembled dataset covering...

This paper presents estimates of the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing, transition, and OECD countries, which are derived by combining figures from different estimation methods. We describe and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the different estimation methods. We find that the...

The healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing areas of social and public spending worldwide, and it is expected to increase its government shares of GDP in the near future. Truly global in its scope, this book presents a unified, structured understanding of how the design of a country's...

"With the proliferation of academic journals and the increased importance attributed to research papers for academic careers, the tradition of writing book manuscripts has become less popular in social sciences. However, there still is a point in writing a book to provide an 'unified overview'...

"This groundbreaking Handbook brings together the two timely subject matters of political economy of health and health care into one comprehensive book. Containing up-to-date discussions on these key topics, it provides an interdisciplinary approach and a better understanding of health policy...

"Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of "official" GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing...