Essays on Consumer Heterogeneity and Optimal Stochastic Resource Allocation

Essays on Consumer Heterogeneity and Optimal Stochastic Resource Allocation PDF Author: Maria Esther Mayorga
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Essays on Consumer Heterogeneity and Optimal Stochastic Resource Allocation

Essays on Consumer Heterogeneity and Optimal Stochastic Resource Allocation PDF Author: Maria Esther Mayorga
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Essays on Consumer Search, Dynamic Competition and Regulation

Essays on Consumer Search, Dynamic Competition and Regulation PDF Author: Alexei Parakhonyak
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9036101786
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Three Essays on Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics

Three Essays on Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics PDF Author: Ryan Douglas Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Economics Essays

Economics Essays PDF Author: Gerard Debreu
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3662046237
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Back in the good old days on the fourth floor of the Altbau of Bonn's Ju ridicum, Werner Hildenbrand put an end to a debate about a festschrift in honor of an economist on the occasion of his turning 60 with a laconic: "Much too early." Remembering his position five years ago, we did not dare to think about one for him. But now he has turned 65. If consulted, he would most likely still answer: "Much too early." However, he has to take his official re tirement, and we believe that this is the right moment for such an endeavor. No doubt Werner Hildenbrand will not really retire. As professor emeritus, free from the constraints of a rigid teaching schedule and the burden of com mittee meetings, he will be able to indulge his passions. We expect him to pursue, with undiminished enthusiasm, his research, travel, golfing, the arts, and culinary pleasures - escaping real retirement.

Three Essays on Consumers' Preferences for Fresh Organic Produce

Three Essays on Consumers' Preferences for Fresh Organic Produce PDF Author: Yuko Onozaka
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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The Architecture of Illegal Markets

The Architecture of Illegal Markets PDF Author: Jens Beckert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198794975
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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This book makes a contribution to understanding the structure of markets on which such illegal transactions occur. The authors apply the tools of economic sociology to develop conceptual frames allowing to understand the organization of such markets and present case studies that provide insights into the illegal side of the economy.

Essays in Public Finance and Industrial Organization

Essays in Public Finance and Industrial Organization PDF Author: Neale Ashok Mahoney
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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This dissertation has four chapters. The first three chapters examine health insurance markets in the U.S., focusing in particular on contexts where there are important interactions between health insurance plans. The fourth chapter is on the U.S. budget, examining the implications of annual budget cycles on the quantity and quality of end-of-year spending. Chapter 1, entitled "Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance" examines the interaction between health insurance and the implicit insurance that people have because they can file (or threaten to file) for bankruptcy. With a simple model that captures key institutional features, I demonstrate that the financial risk from medical shocks is capped by the assets that could be seized in bankruptcy. For households with modest seizable assets, this implicit "bankruptcy insurance" can crowd out conventional health insurance. I test these predictions using variation in the state laws that specify the type and level of assets that can be seized in bankruptcy. Because of the differing laws, people who have the same assets and receive the same medical care face different losses in bankruptcy. Exploiting the variation in seizable assets that is orthogonal to wealth and other household characteristics, I show that households with fewer seizable assets are more likely to be uninsured. This finding is consistent with another: uninsured households with fewer seizable assets end up making lower out-of-pocket medical payments. The estimates suggest that if the laws of the least debtor-friendly state of Delaware were applied nationally, 16.3 percent of the uninsured would buy health insurance. Achieving the same increase in coverage would require a premium subsidy of approximately 44.0 percent. To shed light on puzzles in the literature and examine policy counterfactuals, I calibrate a utility-based, micro-simulation model of insurance choice. Among other things, simulations show that "bankruptcy insurance" explains the low take-up of high-deductible health insurance. Chapter 2, entitled "Pricing and Welfare in Health Plan Choice", is coauthored with M. Kate Bundorf and Jonathan Levin. The starting point for the paper is the simple observation that when insurance premiums do not reflect individual differences in expected costs, consumers may choose plans inefficiently. We study this problem in health insurance markets, a setting in which prices often do not incorporate observable differences in expected costs. We develop a simple model and estimate it using data on small employers. In this setting, the welfare loss compared to the feasible risk-rated benchmark is around 2-11% of coverage costs. Three-quarters of this is due to restrictions on risk-rating employee contributions; the rest is due to inefficient contribution choices. Despite the inefficiency, the benefits from plan choice relative to each of the single-plan options are substantial. Chapter 3, entitled "The Private Coverage and Public Costs: Identifying the Effect of Private Supplemental Insurance on Medicare Spending, " is coauthored with Marika Cabral. While most elderly Americans have health insurance coverage through Medicare, traditional Medicare policies leave individuals exposed to significant financial risk. Private supplemental insurance to "fill the gaps" of Medicare, known as Medigap, is very popular. In this Chapter, we estimate the impact of this supplemental insurance on total medical spending using an instrumental variables strategy that leverages discontinuities in Medigap premiums at state boundaries. Our estimates suggest that Medigap increases medical spending by 57 percent--or about 40 percent more than previous estimates. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that a 20 percent tax on premiums would generate combined revenue and savings of 6.2 percent of baseline costs; a Pigovian tax that fully accounts for the fiscal externality would yield savings of 18.1 percent. Chapter 4, entitled "Do Expiring Budgets Lead to Wasteful Year-End Spending? Evidence from Federal Procurement, " is coauthored with Jeffrey Liebman. Many organizations fund their spending out of a fixed budget that expires at year's end. Faced with uncertainty over future spending demands, these organizations have an incentive to build a buffer stock of funds over the front end of the budget cycle. When demand does not materialize, they then rush to spend these funds on lower quality projects at the end of the year. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the U.S. federal government. Using data on all federal contracts from 2004 through 2009, we document that spending spikes in all major federal agencies during the 52nd week of the year as the agencies rush to exhaust expiring budget authority. Spending in the last week of the year is 4.9 times higher than the rest-of-the-year weekly average. We examine the relative quality of year-end spending using a newly available dataset that tracks the quality of $130 billion in information technology (I.T.) projects made by federal agencies. Consistent with the model, average project quality falls at the end of the year. Quality scores in the last week of the year are 2.2 to 5.6 times more likely to be below the central value. To explore the impact of allowing agencies to roll unused spending over into subsequent fiscal years, we study the I.T. contracts of an agency with special authority to roll over unused funding. We show that there is only a small end-of-year I.T. spending spike in this agency and that the one major I.T. contract this agency issued in the 52nd week of the year has a quality rating that is well above average.

Essays on Consumption Flexibility, Stockpiling and Market Interaction

Essays on Consumption Flexibility, Stockpiling and Market Interaction PDF Author: Liang Guo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Essays on firm heterogeneity and quality in international trade

Essays on firm heterogeneity and quality in international trade PDF Author: Eddy Bekkers
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 905170903X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 2 contains a survey of the three most in‡fluential models on fi…rm heterogeneity and of the most important empirical work on firrm heterogeneity. The chapter starts with a brief review of the homogeneous productivity imperfect competition literature. Chapter 2 …finishes with a comparison of the three most in‡fluential models of fi…rm heterogeneity and the oligopoly model put forward in the thesis. Chapter 3 addresses exporting uncertainty under heterogeneous popularity. Chapter 4 contains the chapter on …firm heterogeneity under oligopoly. Chapter 5 constitutes the models on …firm heterogeneity and endogenous quality. Chapter 6 points out the within-sector specialization model. Chapter 7 addresses the effect of importer characteristics on unit values and the role of markups and quality to explain this effect. Chapter 8 concludes.

Dissertation Abstracts International

Dissertation Abstracts International PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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