Managed care health insurers in the USA restrict their enrollees' choice of hospitals to within specific networks. This paper considers the implications of these restrictions. A three-step econometric model is used to predict consumer preferences over health plans conditional on the hospitals...

This paper uses a dataset collected among inhabitants of Amsterdam, to study the employment effects of the use of cannabis and cocaine. For females no negative effects of drug use on the employment rate are found. For males there is a negative correlation between past cannabis and cocaine use...

Estimation of the linear quadratic model, the workhorse of the inventory literature, traditionally takes inventories and sales to be first-difference stationary series, and the ratio of the two variables to be stationary. However, these assumptions do not always match the properties of the data...

We propose a general double tree structured AR-GARCH model for the analysis of global equity index returns. The model extends previous approaches by incorporating (i) several multivariate thresholds in conditional means and volatilities of index returns and (ii) a richer specification for the...

This paper considers tests of seasonal integration and cointegration for multivariate unobserved component models. First, the locally best invariant (LBI) test of the null hypothesis of a deterministic seasonal pattern against the alternative of seasonal integration is derived for a model with...