Showing 141 - 150 of 25,221
The introduction of Medicare in 1965 was the single largest change in health insurance coverage in U.S. history. Many economists and commentators have conjectured that the introduction of Medicare may have also been an important impetus for the development of new drugs that are now commonly used...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005589015
We study the formation of a ruling coalition in political environments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774462
We study the perfect Bayesian equilibrium of a model of learning over a general social network. Each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world, observes the past actions of a stochastically-generated neighborhood of individuals, and chooses one of two possible actions....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774491
This paper argues that unemployment insurance increases labor productivity by encouraging workers to seek higher productivity jobs, and by encouraging firms to create those jobs. We use a quantitative general equilibrium model to investigate whether this effect is comparable in magnitude to the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774624
The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005774879
Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, as assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777666
Countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies, including high inflation, large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates, appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period. Does this reflect the causal effect of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777909
While much research in political economy points out the benefits of "limited government," political scientists have long emphasized the problems created in many less developed nations by "weak states," which lack the power to tax and regulate the economy and to withstand the political and social...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777958
This paper studies the conditions under which the scarcity of a factor (in particular, labor) encourages technological progress and technology adoption. In standard endogenous growth models, which feature a strong scale effect, an increase in the supply of labor encourages technological...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778012
Inefficiencies in the bureaucratic organization of the state are often viewed as important factors in retarding economic development. Why certain societies choose or end up with such inefficient organizations has received very little attention, however. In this paper, we present a simple theory...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005778107