We assess the ability of health insurance plans with gatekeeping restrictions to control the utilization of medical care through their inuence on the choice of the initial provider. Empirical results are based on the individuallevel utilization panel data from 2001-2006 Medical Expenditure Panel...

The share of public investment relative to consumption expenditure has declined in past decades. Earlier literature has attributed this stylised fact variably to the relative political ease of cutting investment; different cyclical patterns of public investment and consumption; or to EMU’s...

Plott, Wit & Yang (2003) conduct a betting market experiment and nd: First, information was aggregated. This suggests that traders updated their private information based on observed market odds. Second, a model based only on the use of private information seems to fit their data best. The...

Promoting competition among electricity producers is crucial for ensuring allocative efficiency and lower electricity prices. In this paper, I empirically examine the electricity market of England and Wales in order to analyze to what extent the regulatory reforms were successful in promoting...

The paper proves, by construction, the existence of Markovian equilibria in a model of dynamic spatial legislative bargaining. Players bargain over policies in an infinite horizon. In each period, a majority vote takes place between the proposal of a randomly selected player and the status-quo,...

High-stakes admission exams to selective schools create incentives for more intensive study effort possibly increasing study achievements of students. Exploiting the exogenous change of a schooling system and using two waves of TIMSS survey data we find that high-stakes exams increase math test...

The ‘equal punishment for the same crime’ principle is generally agreed upon—yet its implementation differs radically depending on whether the punishment is measured purely in nominal terms or the subjective perspective of the punishee is accounted for. This is simply because different...

We investigate the resource impact on economic growth using matching. Using a nonparametric minimum-distance matching method, we match the countries according to their observable characteristics, and estimate the relative growth rates of each matched pair. This way we are able to analyze the...

The paper attempts to explain a U-shaped pattern of return migration rates with respect to educational attainment. We develop a two period OLG model with emigration and return migration decisions undertaken by agents heterogeneous in terms of educational attainment. The immigration policy is...

Other-regarding preferences are central for the ability to solve collective action problems and thus for society’s welfare. We study how the formation of other-regarding preferences during childhood is related to parental background. Using binary-choice dictator games to classify subjects into...