Background: The devolution of powers over public services from central to local government can enable policy makers to more closely meet the needs of local populations. However, devolved systems may lack the resources and expertise to efficiently implement change. There is limited evidence on...

Decision-makers often determine if technologies are good value for money and should therefore be adopted through value-based decision rules that compare cost-effectiveness analysis results to a threshold value. This decision rule assumes that decision-makers are indifferent between interventions...

This paper investigates how the increased rate of Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) payments implemented on 1 April 2005 affects Scottish general practitioners' (GPs) intrinsic, extrinsic and overall motivation. A first difference method is used to model GPs' intrinsic and overall motivation....

This paper investigates whether and how a change in the performance-related payment scheme motivated General Practitioners (GPs) in Scotland. It evaluates the effect of increases in April 2006 in the performance thresholds required for maximum payment under the Quality and Outcomes Framework...

We propose a new information criterion for impulse response function matching estimators (IRFMEs) of the structural parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) macroeconomic models. An advantage of our procedure is that it allows researchers to select the impulse responses that...

The recognition that policies aimed at “getting prices right” in less developed countries werefailing due to incomplete markets has spurred a new wave of reforms, directed instead at“getting markets and institutions right”. Although previous studies have documented thepotentially crucial...

Abstract We provide formulae for calculating approximate p-values for the non-standard asymptotic null distributions of a variety of tests used for detecting multiple structural change in a wide range of models. Our approximations are based on simulated quantiles obtained from 100,000...

Hall et al. (2007) propose a method for moment selection based on an information criterion that is a function of the entropy of the limiting distribution of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator. They establish the consistency of the method subject to certain conditions that include...

We propose a new information criterion for impulse response function matching estimators of the structural parameters of macroeconomic models. The main advantage of our procedure is that it allows the researcher to select the impulse responses that are most informative about the deep parameters,...

In this article, I derive the Lagrange multiplier test of the null hypothesis that a stationary random vector has a (possibly heteroscedastic) normal distribution against the alternative that the distribution is a member of the family with seminonparametric probability density functions...