Despite the importance of supplier inducement and brand loyalty in the drug purchasing process, little empirical evidence is to be found with regard to the influence that these factors exert on patients’ decisions. Under the new scenario of easier access to information, patients are becoming...

We examine the conditions under which competitive equilibria can be obtained as the limit, when the number of strategic traders gets large, of Nash equilibria in economies with asymmetric information on agents' effort and possibly imperfect observability of agents' trades. Convergence always...

Human beings increase their productivity by specializing their resources and exchanging their products. The organization of exchange is costly, however, because specialized activities need coordination and incentives have to be aligned. This work first describes how these exchanges are organized...

This paper analyses the demand for private health care by Spanish households using a micro budget survey. The methodology used takes care of the three part decision process involved in this type of behaviour, namely the decision to use private health care, how often to do so and how much to...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Can agnostics rely on international income data to tell them which matter? We find that agnostic priors lead to conclusions that are sensitive to differences across available income estimates. For example, the PWT 6.2...

Many multivariate methods that are apparently distinct can be linked by introducing one or more parameters in their definition. Methods that can be linked in this way are correspondence analysis, unweighted or weighted logratio analysis (the latter also known as "spectral mapping"), nonsymmetric...

This paper studies the duration pattern of …xed-term contracts and the determinants of their conversion into permanent ones in Spain, where the share of …xed-term employment is the highest in Europe. We estimate a duration model for temporary employment, with competing risks of terminating...

We address the question of whether growth and welfare can be higher in crisis prone economies. First, we show that there is a robust empirical link between per-capita GDP growth and negative skewness of credit growth across countries with active financial markets. That is, countries that have...

Why are Bismarckian social security systems associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income in-equality than Beveridgean systems? These facts are puzzling for political economy theories of social security which predict that Beveridgean...