Empirical analyses for the US suggest that stronger people’s control over the school budget is deleterious to student performance. Using Swiss data on ninth graders in mathematics, reading and natural science collected jointly with the PISA study 2000, this paper tests this hypothesis for...

The paper investigates the redistributive effects of the Swedish health care financing system in 1980 and 1990 for four different financial sources: County council taxes, payroll taxes, direct payments oand state grants. The redistributive effects are decomposed into vertical, horizontal and...

The paper explores the question of whether markets under laissez-faire will be able to insulate an economy from bad government money. Some recent proposals favour freezing the monetary base, by abandoning central bank operations. This requires active participation by the monetary authorities,...

Casual observation suggests that people are more generous with their time than with their money. In this paper we present experimental evidence supporting the hypothesis. A third of our subjects demand no compensation for non-monetary investments, whereas almost all subjects demand compensation...

Using a microbased superpopulation approach (see Cassel and Lundquist (1991), (1990))the question of optimal predictors of a population total of AR(1) series is analysed. Only a sample of the individual timeseries in the population is observed. From the sample the population total is predicted....

Abstract: We performed a cross-sectional, "bottom-up" observational study of resource consumption and quality of life of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) in the United Kingdom. Three centers participated in the study. Patients received a questionnaire either by mail or during a clinic...

In this paper, which is a substantial extension of the earlier essay Björk (2001), we give an overview of some recent work on the geometric properties of the evolution of the forward rate curve in an arbitrage free bond market. The main problems to be discussed are as follows. <p> 1. When is a...</p>

In this paper we discuss the efficiency properties of insurance markets where supplementary private insurance is allowed to exist together with a compulsory government insurance plan. Our main conclusion, which is contrary to both those of Besley (1989) and Selden (1993), is that in a simple...

In this paper I present two new Lagrange multiplier test statistics designed for testing the null of GARCH (1,1), against the alternative of asymmetric GARCH. For one test the alternative is the generalized QARCH (1,1) model of Sentana [1995], and for the other the alternative is the logistic...

We study costless pre-play communication of intentions among inexperienced players. Using the level-k model of strategic thinking to describe players' beliefs, we fully characterize the effects of pre-play communication in symmetric 2×2 games. One-way communication weakly increases coordination...