Changes are occurring in the provision of consumer credit, including the expansion of subprime and some fringe financial services (e.g., payday lending). We link two existing literatures on credit constraint and financial exclusion to assess the impact of these developments on the financial...

Despite the absence of a formal definition of the relationship between the marginal and the global effects of risk, in the literature termed the economics of uncertainty, intuition would suggest it unjustifiable to presume that these two concepts are categorically independent. This paper...

Many low-income countries are implementing non-profit medical insurance to increase access to health services, especially among low-income households, and to raise additional revenue for financing public health services. This paper estimates the effect of insurance on out-of-pocket health...

The wage opportunities afforded different racial groups vary considerably. We present a new analysis of wage differentials for different visible minority groups in Canada which also accounts for immigration background, using the first wave of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. With the...

The master file of the Labour Market Activity Survey is used to investigate the effect of disability on labour market activity. Our results indicate the importance of acknowledging the severity of disability, of distinguishing between men and women, and of distinguishing between earnings and...

Few studies analyze the effects of health insurance on inpatient care in low income countries. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of Vietnam's health insurance schemes on both hospital admission and the length of stay (LOS) using the Vietnam National Health Survey...

Using Vietnam's latest National Household Survey data for 2001-2002 this paper assesses the influence of individual, household and commune-level characteristics on a woman's decision to seek prenatal care, on the number of prenatal visits, and on the choice between giving birth at a health...

Recent estimates of a negative empirical relationship between inflation and the rate of growth of productivity provide a strong case for vigorous anti-inflationary policy. This paper tests the robustness of this evidence using long quarterly and annual datasets for four countries (Canada, United...

Previous research finds that the children of immigrants, or the second generation, earn at least as much as other native born but that there are persistent ethnic differences in the intergenerational transmission of education and wages. We explain why these results are not incompatible and...