This paper summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of smoking...

The obesity rate in the United States has risen significantly in the past few decades. While a number of economic causes for the rise in obesity have been explored, little attention has been on the role of health insurance per se. This paper examines obesity in the context of a model where...

We introduce uncertainty about farmer characteristics into the moral hazard problem facing a regulator offering agri-environmental contracts. Our model allows for a continuum of farmer compliance costs. For reasonable parameter values the model predicts high levels of cheating and intensive...

This research uses the input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to examine the efficiency of the U.S. health insurers. It shows that more insurers are less efficient than the previous sample year; however, the results suggest that the federal health care reform have no significant...

International Joint Ventures (IJVs) combine the resources of local and foreign firms to create independent business entities that are able to avoid the risks of cross-border transactions and to gain access to new markets. Despite these advantages, the failure rate of IJVs is very high. This book...

We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism...