The major German health care reforms undertaken since the late 1990s resulted in the adoption of selective contracting mechanisms in a formerly sectorally separated health care system. These reforms marked the launch of managed care in Germany that is expected to yield both a higher quality of...

Within a higher-dimensional incomplete specialization Heckscher-Ohlin framework, we first develop a gravity model that views bilateral gravity equations as statistical relationships constrained on countries’ multilateral specialization patterns. Second, we test our model empirically by using a...

By combining and extending the previous literature, we develop and test a gravity specification that views bilateral gravity equations rooted in a Heckscher-Ohlin framework as statistical relationships constrained on countries’ multilateral specialization patterns. According to our results,...

We collect half-yearly data on nonstop flight frequencies offered by carriers on routes originating from Italian regions to European countries in the period 1998–2010. We find that, as the share of flights belonging to global alliances increases, the number of flights offered by airlines...

In this work I investigate the responsiveness of Italian workers to the early retirement incentives provided by the Social Security (SS) and try to shed light on the nature of the puzzling age-60-spike in the retirement hazards. The empirical analysis carried out on a sample drawn from the panel...

In this paper, we consider sieve instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) estimation of functional coefficient models where the coefficients of endogenous regressors are unknown functions of some exogenous covariates. We approximate the unknown functional coefficients by some basis...

Many countries are part of multiple international air-pollution agreements that interact with each other given that a single source of emissions is typically composed of several pollutants. This paper studies the effect on carbon dioxide emissions of the various agreements that follow the...

This paper considers the effect of international air-pollution agreements ratified since 1970 on carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 150 countries over the period 1970-2008. While the literature generally...

The paper examines the impact of regulatory intervention on store card interest rates, for a panel of UK store cards. The analysis is timely given the public attention that high store card interest rates have attracted in the UK, and the enquiries by the Office of Fair Trading and the...

We argue that how inward foreign direct investment (FDI) affects domestic investment (DI) depends on the degree of financial deregulation. Utilizing the Chinese experience and its panel data, instrumenting FDI with weather indicators (validity supported by over-identification tests), our...