Is the role of government different in poor countries? We examine the government's role for growth in 40 LDCs with low infrastructure levels and limited access to capital. We consider both expenditure and financing aspects of government activity, but cannot conclude that governments in LDCs...

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...

In this paper we test for existence of cointegration between health expenditure and GDP using data from 19 OECD countries for the period 1960-1995. Country-by-country and panel results based on the Johansen multivariate likelihood-based inference and a new panel test for cointegration rank are...

This paper investigates the effects of different health systems on cost efficiency in inpatient health care among the OECD countries. The results indicate that public contract systems are less efficient and that public integrated health systems are more efficient than public reimbursement systems.

This paper proposes an approach to specify and estimate multiple input, multiple output production frontiers and technical efficiency using a stochastic ray frontier production model A possible model extension is to incorporate a technical efficiency effects model to allow estimation of the...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of the deregulation of the Swedish banking industry in the mid-1980s, and the consequent banking crisis, on productive efficiency and productivity growth in the industry. An unbalanced panel of Swedish banks is studied over the period, 1984 to...

This paper presents a new dynamic ARCH-related conditionally heteroscedastic stochastic frontier model specification where firm and time-specific technical inefficiency is represented by an autoregressive stochastic process in the error components. Monte Carlo results reveal that a one-sided...

The recent findings by McCoskey and Selden (1997, Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming) that health expenditure and GDP are stationary are driven by the omission of time trends in their ADF regressions. Since both health expenditure and GDP are trending, this omission raise serious doubts on...

This paper considers maximum likelihood estimation and inference in the two-way random effects model with serial correlation. We derive a straightforward maximum likelihood estimator when the time-specific component follow an AR(1) or MA(1) process. The estimator is easily generalized to...

This paper studies the effects of financial liberalization and banking crises on growth. It shows that financial liberalization spurs on average economic growth. Banking crises are harmful for growth, but to a lesser extent in countries with open financial systems and good institutions. <p> The...</p>