The authors examine the design and limitations of incentives for health care providers to serve in rural areas in developing countries. Governments face two problems: it is costly to compensate well-trained urban physicians enough to relocate to rural areas, and it is difficult to ensure quality...

This paper examines the appropriate taxation of financial services under a broad-based consumption tax. It is assumed that the underlying objective of the consumption tax is to maintain undistorted prices between current and future consumption (i.e. to impose no distortion on savings decisions)...

I study the use of risk adjusters as a regulatory instrument for combatting cream-skimming incentives in a private health insurance market. It is assumed that insurance coverage is mandatory for all individuals, and that insurers must charge community-rated premiums - i.e., premiums independent...

The paper examines the nature of health insurance contracts when insurance companies are forced to pool high and low risk individuals. Insureres have an incentive to design contracts so as to attract only better brisks, and equilibrium contracts are generally characterised by less coevrage and...

When medical care prices and individual health needs follow stochastic processes with non-zero trends, community rating facilitates lifetime insurance and intergenerational risk sharing. While such policies are unsustainable in competitive private insurance markets, they provide the basis for...

Existence of pure strategy equilibria is studied in insurance markets that exhibit both ex ante adverse selection of the Rothschild-Stiglitz-Wilson type, and ex post hidden information moral hazard. It is found that ex post moral hazard has two offsetting effects on the existence of equilibrium,...

We use a public economics framework to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the R&D incentive comes from sales revenues. We employ familiar techniques of public finance to relax some of the restrictions implied in the standard use of Ramsey pricing. In the more...