This paper employs a panel of 16 OECD countries over the period 1975–2009 to reexamine the health care expenditure (HCE)-income relationship by considering a lagged ratio of public expenditures on health as the transition variable in panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) models. PSTR...

This study employs four data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to evaluate the performance efficiency of 21 OECD countries and assess whether the undesirable outputs are over-produced relative to desirable outputs. In evaluating the performance of OECD countries via super-efficiency models, this...

This paper employs the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model to investigate the role of Okun’s misery index in the persistence of health spending in 19 OECD countries from 1980 to 2010. The empirical result shows that the health spending in the sample countries displays a nonlinear...

The human development index (HDI) rankings have provided a referenced measure for people to choose a country in which to travel or live. This paper employs a superefficiency model to evaluate the rationality of the HDI rankings of 19 evaluated OECD countries in 2009. Compared to the HDI...

This paper investigates the threshold effects on the impacts of fundamentals (i.e., incomes, exchange rates, oil prices, and import-weighted distances) on China's trade balances with the G7 countries between 1975 and 2010 by using a panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model with the...