Free markets for health care in Africa do not function properly, in that patients exhibit willingness to pay for health care and yet practitioners are unable to sell their services. It is widely acknowledged that health markets everywhere are troubled with imperfect information. Therefore it is...

The notion of Social System of Innovation and Production (SSIP) refers to an approach that tries to incorporate institutional elements into the economic analysis of technological change and to study the impact of these elements on long-term economic performance. The complementarities that exist...

Microcredit seeks to promote business growth and improve well-being by expanding access to credit. We use a field experiment and follow-up survey to measure impacts of a credit expansion for microentrepreneurs in Manila. The effects are diffuse, heterogeneous, and surprising. Although there is...

This paper proposes a unified framework for measuring and managing longevity risk. Specifically, we develop a flexible framework for valuing survivor derivatives like forwards, swaps, as well as options both of European and American style. Our framework is essentially independent of the assumed...

This short paper considers all possible stakeholders in different stages of a sustainability transition and matches their behavioral features and diversity to policies. This will involve an assessment of potential or expected responses of stakeholders to a range of policy instruments. Following...

This paper proposes an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economy with an implicit market for productive time. In this economy, agents have limited productive time and can choose to produce in autarky, buy productive time from helpers to increase own production or, sell their...

In the presence of (at least locally) increasing returns to scale tech- nologies, the paper asks the question: does there exist an economic system which implements Pareto efficient allocations and respects the voluntary participation principle? To answer this question, the paper formulates an...

This paper discusses some issues related to the triangle between capital accumulation, distribution, and capacity utilization. First, it explains why utilization is a crucial variable for the various theories of growth and distribution-more precisely, with regards to their ability to combine an...

The paper makes three contributions. First, following up on Nikiforos (2016), it provides an in-depth examination of the Federal Reserve measure of capacity utilization and shows that it is closer to a cyclical indicator than a measure of long run variations of normal utilization. Other...

The paper provides an empirical discussion of the national emergency utilization rate (NEUR), which is based on a "national emergency" definition of potential output and is published by the US Census Bureau. Over the peak-to-peak period 1989-2019, the NEUR decreased by 14.2 percent. The paper...