Provincial and state-level analyses are conducted using panel data sets for Argentina and Mexico to assess the efficiency of provinces and states in improving health and education outcomes. Stochastic frontier estimation methods are used to determine optimal outcomes that could be reached with...

This paper provides an explanation for the common observation that higher income neighborhoods typically receive better public services compared with lower income neighborhoods. Intuitively, one might expect that lower income groups, which usually form the voting majority of cities, would object...

Fierce debate is ongoing in China concerning the appropriate role for the private sector in the current stage of reform and enterprise restructuring. There are many economists, both within China and without, who argue that China should now increase both the scale and pace of privatisation and...

Elbert Dijkgraaf defended his PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch Waste Market' at 5 november 2004. This thesis analyses whether the risen costs of waste collection and treatment can be diminished by changing policy instruments. The thesis shows that user fees are very effective in reducing the...

Endogenous order of moves in quantity choice is analyzed in a mixed oligopoly with one public firm, n domestic private firms and m foreign private firms. We consider the observable delay game of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990) in the context of a quantity setting mixed oligopoly where firms first...

This paper examines the effects of school vouchers on public school quality in a simple two-community model with local provision of education. Individuals differ only by income and one community imposes a fixed exogenous costs on its residents. The equilibria of the model are stratified with the...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the 'dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

Nella teoria neo-classica dell’ottimalità allocativa i trasferimenti redistributivi in moneta sono generalmente considerati superiori a quelli in natura, perché i primi rispettano il principio della sovranità del consumatore. Tuttavia, anche impiegando il modello neo-classico, è stato...

We estimate the impact on out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenditure of a major reform in Thailand that greatly extended health insurance coverage to achieve universality while implementing supply-side measures intended to deliver cost-effective care from an increased, but modest, public health...

We study gatekeeping physicians’ referrals of patients to specialty care. We derive theoretical results when competition in the physician market intensifies. First, due to competitive pressure, physicians refer patients to specialty care more often. Second, physicians earn more by treating...