This paper presents a signaling explanation for unemployment. The basic idea is that employment at an unskilled job may be regarded as a bad signal. Therefore, good workers who are more likely to qualify for employment at a skilled job in the future are better off being unemployed than accepting...

In our theoretical model some firms do not offer health insurance to their employees because of large between-firm heterogeneity in expected employee health care costs. Because job turnover rates for healthier employees reduce by less than those for sicker employees when firms offer health...

A government or public organization would like to subsidize an indivisible good. Consumers’ valuations of the good vary according to their wealth and benefits from the good. Education, medical care, and housing are common examples. A regulator has access to either wealth or benefit...

We model physicians as health care professionals who care about their services and monetary rewards. These preferences are heterogeneous. Different physicians trade off the monetary and service motives differently, and therefore respond differently to incentive schemes. Our model is set up for...

In this article, we study the optimal regulation of a dominant firm when an unregulated firm actively competes. Generally, the existence of an active rival imposes new and binding constraints on regulatory problems. We characterize optimal policies both when demands are known (complete...

We study the interaction between a public sector and a private sector in the provision of a private good. Under a limited budget, the public supplier uses a rationing policy. A private ?rm may supply the good to those consumers who are rationed by the public system. Consumers have di¤erent...