Money and Medicines: An Economic Analysis of Reference Pricing and Related Public-sector Cost-containment Systems for Pharmaceuticals with Special Reference to New Zealand, by Alan Woodfield, John Fountain and Pim Borren (Merck Sharp and Dohme (New Zealand) Ltd.), October 1997 Tigers in New...

The Canadian banking system experienced a prolonged period of stability prior to the introduction of deposit insurance in 1967. Documenting the reasons for this stability provides important evidence in the debate over the impact of mandatory flat-rate deposit insurance. In this paper we use new...

In certain industries, sales agent contracts include provisions for sales commissions and clawbacks of commissions if clients are not retained. We show that contracts with these features arise in environments having up-front selling costs recouped from ongoing sales; heterogeneous customers;...

We demonstrate that a multi-period model, and the valuations it implies, is essential for understanding inefficiency in cooperative organizational forms. Investment is efficient given the supply of input, but economic inefficiency arises because of over-supply of input induced by suppliers...

Positive models of public-utility regulation should capture personal incentives of regulators. A regulatory objective function is specified by appea l to standard human concerns coupled with politics and processes pecu liar to public-utility regulation. Constraints a rational regulator w ould...

We present a model featuring irreversible investment, economies of scale, uncertain future demand and capital prices, and a regulator who sets the firm’s output price according to the cost structure of a hypothetical replacement firm. We show that a replacement firm has a fundamental cost...

The very restrictive nature of systems of supply and demand functions that have constant elasticities is well known. The same is not true of single constant own-price elasticity demand functions. This paper points out the extremely limiting properties implied by the assumption of a single...