The use of pharmacoeconomic tools has grown dramatically in the past decade as provision of healthcare throughout the industrialised world has required increased cost consciousness. However, pharmacoeconomic analysis has not yet been fully exploited as a conceptual underpinning for public or...

In this paper, the authors develop a measure of the cost of inflation uncertainty where a risk premium can be interpreted as the amount of real consumption that a representative agent is willing to forgo in order to be guaranteed a perfectly anticipated path of inflation. This premium can be...

In this paper, the authors provide some missing elements to the theory of the regulated firm and discuss implications for econometric specification. Particular attention is paid to situations where capital is quasi-fixed under rate-of-return regulation, which may lead to serious specification...

This paper examines whether a competitive model of the firm appropriately describes the behavior of hospitals in a non-market environment. This test is based on the best database yet available in the hospital sector. We show that properties of the non-market hospitals'cost functions are...

We present a dynamic model of factor demands based on expected discounted costs minimization. While making only very mild assumptions on expectations and technology, we are able to establish a duality relationship between contemporary factor demands and the technology, and we provide formula for...

In this article, we perform a quantitative analysis of the performance of hospital services in a nonmarket environment based on a very complete data set. Evaluating efficiency in a nonmarket system is important since the absence of market mechanisms could yield large inefficiencies. In fact, we...

The authors explain why comparing the total factor productivities o f extractive and nonextractive sectors is likely to be misleading. They then propose a correction and implement it for the case of asbestos, where it turns out to make a significant difference.

In this paper the efficiency of Quebec's school boards during a period of severe cutbacks in their finance is examined. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, the average efficiency is found to be relatively high. In spite of this, potential savings could be achieved if school boards were fully...