This paper considers an economy where individuals differ in productivity and in risk. Rochet (1991) has shown that when private insurance markets offer full coverage at fair rates, social insurance is desirable if and only if risk and productivity are negatively correlated. This condition is...

The capital-to-labor ratio has steadily risen in the U.S. and elsewhere during the post-WWII period. Since the 1970s this rise has been accompanied by a rise in the level and variability of corporate profits whereas the labor share of income has declined. In this paper we ask whether these...

Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

In February 2015, the editors of eight health economics journals sent out an editorial statement which aims to reduce the extent of specification searching and reminds referees to accept studies that: "have potential scientific and publication merit regardless of whether such studies' empirical...

Consider a union of atomistic member states, each faced with idiosyncratic business-cycle shocks. Private cross-border risk-sharing is limited, giving a role to a federal unemployment-based transfer scheme. Member states control local labor-market policies, giving rise to a trade-off between...

Starting from December 2012, insurers in the European Union were prohibited from charging gender-discriminatory prices. We examine the effect of this unisex mandate on risk segmentation in the German health insurance market. While gender used to be a pricing factor in Germany's private health...

We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance decisions and health care utilization. Estimates of the health care utilization models indicate...

This paper begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for...

We construct a model of offshoring with externalities and firm heterogeneity. Due to the presence of externalities, temporary shocks like the Y2K problem can have permanent effects, i.e., they can permanently raise the extent of offshoring in an industry. Also, the initial advantage of a country...

In this paper we discuss tests for residual cross section dependence in nonlinear panel data models. The tests are based on average pair-wise residual correlation coefficients. In nonlinear models, the definition of the residual is ambiguous and we consider two approaches: deviations of the...