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For several decades now a debate has raged about policy-making by litigation. Spurred by the way in which tobacco, environmental, and other litigation has functioned as an alternative form of regulation, the debate asks whether policy-making or regulation by litigation is more or less socially...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084662
Hurricane Katrina did massive damage because New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were not appropriately protected. Wherever natural disasters threaten, the government -- in its traditional role as public goods provider -- must decide what level of protection to provide to an area. It does so by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084856
Individual choice over health insurance policies may result in risk-based sorting across plans. Such adverse selection induces three types of losses: efficiency losses from individuals being allocated to the wrong plans; risk sharing losses since premium variability is increased; and losses from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084946
Catholic churches in Renaissance Florence supported themselves overwhelmingly from the contributions of wealthy citizens. The sale of private chapels within churches to individuals was a significant source of church funds, and facilitated a church construction boom. Chapel sales offered three...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084954
We examine why managed care plans are less expensive than traditional indemnity insurance plans. Our database consists of the insurance experiences of over 200,000 state and local employees in Massachusetts and their families, who are insured in a single pool. Within this group, average HMO...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084963
Are market and voting institutions capable of producing optimal intergenerational risk-sharing? To study this question, we consider a simple endowment economy with uncertainty and overlapping generations. Endowments are stochastic; thus it is possible to increase the welfare of every generation...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005085348
Over 250 respondents--graduate students in law and public policy--assessed the risks of climate change and valued climate-change mitigation policies. Many aspects of their behavior were consistent with rational behavior. For example, respondents successfully estimated distributions of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005087460
Among political practitioners, there is conventional wisdom about the outcomes of critical and salient legislative votes. 'This vote,' we hear, ' will either win by a little or lose by a lot.' Real-world examples suggest coalition leaders purchase 'hip-pocket' votes and "if you need me" pledges,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005575677
Requiring agents with private information to select from a menu of incentive schedules can yield efficiency gains. It will do so if, and only if, agents will receive further private information after selecting the incentive schedule but before taking the action that determines where on the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005580065
An important risk facing agents in a monetary economy arises from inflation uncertainty: in the U.S. for the 1953-84 period, unexpected quarterly inflation had a standard deviation of 2.1%. The costs of such uncertainty are likely to be even higher for multi-year contracts, since we estimate...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005580684