The health care industry in some countries displays a gated structure. Rather than approaching a specialist directly, a patient will first seek a referral from a general practitioner. We provide one possible explanation for such an industry structure. If the outcome of treatment depends on the...

We use the 2004-'05 wave of the Australian National Health Survey to estimate the impact of private hospital insurance on the propensity for hospitalization as a private patient. We employ instrumental-variable methods to account for the endogeneity of supplementary private hospital insurance...

In this paper we empirically analyse two counterfactual situations facing an antitrust au- thority following the merger of two of the largest international cigarette companies. First we estimate a random coecients model of demand for cigarettes. The implied elasticity of demand for smoking and...

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of Catholic school attendance on high schoolcompletion and university commencement and completion for Australian students. First, an instrumental variables approach is adopted where the probability of Catholic affiliation is used as an instrument....

The question of why more African Americans did not migrate earlier out of the stagnant and repressive South after emancipation remains open. Previous work has highlighted the role of demand and supply conditions. At the time, though there was much concern about the role of emigrant agents who...

The systemic nature of economic inefficiency in Australia’s mental health services sector is serious.

We use the 2004-'05 wave of the Australian National Health Survey to estimate the impact of private hospital insurance on the utilization of hospital care services in Australia. We employ the two-stage residual inclusion approach (2SRI) to account for the endogeneity of supplementary private...

This paper studies the dynamic evolution of an economy in which parents can choose to send their child to a public or private school and vote over taxes used to fund public schools. The objective is to study growth and the evolution of income distribution in a model where alternative education...