This study uses the Swedish register of prescribed drugs, merged with the Survey of Living Conditions (the ULF), to analyze the socioeconomic gradient in drug utilization. It finds a significant education gradient (but no income gradient) in individual drug utilization. Whereas the education...

We survey the literature on the effects of public sector outsourcing. Guided by theory, we systematically arrange services according to the type and magnitude of their contractibility problems. Taken as a whole, the empirical literature indicates that public sector outsourcing generally reduces...

China’s unbalanced growth strategy has seemingly fostered growing inter-regional growth disparities and there is little evidence of wealth trickling down from richer provinces to poorer provinces. Given pronounced and frequent inter-regional short-term fluctuations in economic growth, standard...

In economics it is common to distinguish between different time horizons (i.e. short run, medium run, and long run). Engle (1974) proposed combining the discrete Fourier transform with a band spectrum regression to estimate models that separates between different time horizons. In this paper we...

This paper analyzes the problem of selecting a set of items whose prices are to be updated in the next iteration in so called simple ascending auctions with unit-demand bidders. A family of sets called "sets in excess demand" is introduced, and the main results demonstrate that a simple...

A common real-life problem is to fairly allocate a number of indivisible objects and a fixed amount of money among a group of agents. Fairness requires that each agent weakly prefers his consumption bundle to any other agent’s bundle. In this context, fairness is incompatible with...

This paper considers the sealed bid and ascending auction, which both identifies the minimum Walrasian equilibrium prices and where truthful preference revelation constitutes an equilibrium. Even though these auction formats share many theoretical properties, there are behavioral aspects that...

This paper investigates empirically a number of hypotheses that are related to efficiency and price uniformity in online competing auctions for train tickets. The data set is ideal for analyzing competing auctions since each ticket is sold in a separate auction and all auctions with identical...

This study uses Swedish data to analyze why the SES-health gradient increases with ageing. Since different measures of SES and health capture different aspects, we use this information to explore the age increase in health inequality and to discriminate between three types of explanations,...

Aiming to explore how the survival of trade flows has evolved over time, we analyze a rich data set of detailed imports to individual EU15 countries from 140 non-EU exporters, covering the period 1962-2006. We find that short duration is a persistent characteristic of trade throughout the...