One is always hesitant to speak about the future. A famous philosopher from New York, Yogi Berra, said "Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future," and I have some trepidation about doing so now. There is also the difficulty of understanding what really has happened in the...

Just as managed care has changed utilization and incentives in other parts of health care, there is a whole set of incentives built around long-term care that really matter. For example, if nursing homes have a financial incentive to hospitalize people with certain health conditions, then in the...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities) taking a differential game approach, in which quality is a stock variable. Using a Hotelling framework, we derive the open-loop solution (providers commit to an...

We consider a two-period model. In the first period, individuals consume two goods: one is sinful and the other is not. The sin good brings pleasure but has a detrimental effect on second period health and individuals tend to underestimate this effect. In the second period, individuals can...

Most studies on the green tax reform issue point out that environmental taxes exacerbate pre-existing tax distortions, thereby increasing the welfare costs associated with the overall tax code. As a result, the optimal environmental tax should lie below the Pigovian level (or marginal social...

Nowadays, there is a growing interest about including indirect costs of health care programs in economic evaluations. In this paper, we provide a generalized cost-analysis of screening programs and propose a technique to measure production gains associated with these programs. We apply this...

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between obesity and wages, using data for nine countries from the European Com- munity Household Panel (ECHP) over the period 1998-2001. We improve upon the existing literature by adopting a Quantile Regression approach to characterize...

Productivity research is Canada has traditionally focused on narrow economic issues. In our view, it has given inadequate attention to the broader ramifications of productivity, both in terms of shedding light on the importance of productivity for the advancement of various aspects of social...

Many states of the U.S. use population formulas to limit the number of on premise or off premise retail alcoholic beverage consumption outlets. The purposes of these restrictions are to reduce the negative externalities from alcoholic beverage consumption and to limit the spillovers associated...