The temporal interdependence between health expenditure and economic growth has been the focus in a number of recent empirical studies. While some insights have been gained from these studies, the focus has been on national economies, either in developed or developing countries. This paper...

Health system efficiency is a major target of health policy but its conceptualization and measurement are still a problem in health economics. Because health status is influenced by many factors outside the health system, I argue that measurements of health system efficiency should focus on the...

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the evidence on the excess smoothness of consumption within the permanent income model, by using recently available monthly data. Two formulations of the univariate process of personal disposable income are adopted: in the levels and in the log-levels....

Monetary policy contributes to stabilize growth. Particularly in a reforming context for financial and economic activities, it is important to know how central bankers' decisions through the short term interest rate of the money market are transmitted to the real variables: the GDP and the...

This paper examines the pricing of month-by-month time-varying risks on the Japanese stock market over the period from 1981 to 2004. Using the multivariate GARCH model, we tested the conditional version of the Sharpe-Lintner-Mossin CAPM. In contrast to previous studies, we derive and focus...

Empirical support for purchasing power parity is mixed with results dependent on the time frame and countries under examination, the methodology employed, attempts to control for aggregation bias in the data, and whether adjustments are made to account for productivity differences across...

A contract where the agent is compensated ex post only upon satisfactory performance, often called a no-cureno-pay contract, can arise as under several circumstances. In this paper, we model the problem of contractual choice as a principal-agent contract which is modified due to hidden...

According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, identity theft constituted the number one consumer complaint in the United States in 2006. Using state-level data for the 50 states for 2005, we find, among other things, that the rate of reported identity theft per 100,000 population is directly...

The theoretical richness and variety of the new growth literature can make it difficult to capture the essence of growth models. With this paper, we wish to provide one possible integrating view of the nature of the growth generating processes. Revisiting the models that constitute the core of...

More than half of the assets in China's banking system are accounted for by four huge state-owned commercial banks. This paper examines the changing factors influencing these banks' lending behavior over the post-1994 period on a province-by-province basis. Determinants include the concentration...