Attachment of wage as a way for creditors to enforce payment by unwilling or insolvent debtors is not very successful in several countries. Based on a dynamic model of debtor behaviour, this paper explores two alternatives of reform. One is to reduce the rate of attachment, which at present...

This contribution seeks to answer two related questions. First, what is the purpose of social health insurance? Or put in slightly different terms, what are the reasons for social (or public) health insurance to exist, even to dominate private health insurance in most developed countries? And...

This paper contains a critique of solvency regulation such as imposed on banks by Basel I and II. Banks investment divisions seek to maximize the expected rate of return on risk-adjusted capital. For them, a higher solvency level lowers the cost of refinancing but ties costly capital. Sequential...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and non-medical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. However, medical inputs may have an additional benefit in the form of a reduced variability of health...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal scale of local jurisdictions (cantons) in Switzerland applying Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to the years 2000 to 2004. Aggregate output performance indicators for four local government activities (administration, education, health, and...

The sustainability of the welfare state ultimately depends on citizens' preferences for income redistribution. They are elicited through a Discrete Choice Experiment performed in 2008 in Switzerland. Attributes are redistribution as GDP share, its uses (the unemployed, old-age pensioners, people...

This paper takes the economist's point of view for explaining why psychotherapy seems to be a particulary difficult discipline and what could be done about it. Whereas the so-called agency relationship (i.e. a specialized agent acting on behalf of an uniformed client) can be counted upon to...

This contribution contains an international comparison of preferences. Using two Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE), it measures willingness to pay for health insurance attributes in Germany and the Netherlands. Since the Dutch DCE was carried out right after the 2006 health reform, which made...