This paper reviews what has increased medical-care spending bought in terms of health benefits with longitudinal data from the U.S and, more limited, from Spain. Health services contribution to health has been positive in average, especially during the last 50 years for the U.S and the last 30...

Early in the 2000s, a countrywide health services research initiative was launched under the acronym of Atlas VPM: Atlas of Variations in Medical Practice in the Spanish National Health System. This initiative aimed at describing systematic and unwarranted variations in medical practice at...

. El objetivo del estudio fue estimar los pesos de calidad de vida (PCV) para España, para los años 1987, 1993 y 2001, a partir del estado de salud autopercibido declarado en la Encuesta Nacional de Salud y mediante un modelo probit ordenado. Los resultados muestran que los PCV difieren según...

The principal aim of this paper is to estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and an inefficiency effects model in the analysis of the primary health-care services purchased by the public authority and supplied by 180 providers in 1996 in Catalonia. The evidence from our sample does not...

This article highlights the contributions of business dynamics research to industrial policy design. Business creation support programs are widespread despite the fact that the optimal rate of business creation and destruction remains unknown. Economic analysis emphasizes heterogeneity as the...

Background. In Spain's "MIR" system of allocating residency training positions, medical school graduates are ranked according to their performance on a national exam and then sequentially choose from the remaining available training slots. We studied how changes in the MIR system might address...

Welfare is a rather vague term whose meaning depends on ideology, values and judgments. Material resources are just means to enhance peoples well-being, but growth of the Gross Domestic Production is still the standard measure of the success of a society. Fortunately, recent advances in...

This paper proposes a framework to implement regression-based tests of predictive ability in unstable environments, including, in particular, forecast unbiasedness and efficiency tests, commonly referred to as tests of forecast rationality. Our framework is general: it can be applied to...

We analyze holdings of public bonds by over 20,000 banks in 191 countries, and the role of these bonds in 20 sovereign defaults over 1998-2012. Banks hold many public bonds (on average 9% of their assets), particularly in less financially-developed countries. During sovereign defaults, exposure...

This paper studies exchange rate policy in a small open economy model featuring an occasionally binding collateral constraint and Fisherian deflation. The goal is to evaluate the performance of alternative exchange rate policies in sudden stop-prone economies. The key element of the analysis is...