A simple proof of Ekeland and Scheinkman's result on the necessity of a transversality condition

Summary. Ekeland and Scheinkman (1986) prove the necessity of a standard transversality condition under certain technical conditions. Their result is one of the most powerful on the necessity of a transversality condition currently available in the literature, and their proof involves numerous estimations and relies on Ekeland's variational principle and Fatou's lemma. This note relaxes some of their assumptions and provides a simple proof that uses neither Ekeland's principle nor a convergence result like Fatou's lemma. Received: April 24, 1998; revised version: September 8, 1998     

On the efficiency of the negligence rule

The three versions of the negligence rule discussed in the literature differ regarding whether a negligent injurer is liable for the entire loss or only for the incremental loss; or regarding whether negligence is defined as failure to take at least due care or failure to take a cost‐justified precaution. It is shown in the paper that the incremental version with untaken precaution notion of negligence is not efficient; not even for the unilateral case. The paper also establishes, for the bilateral case, the efficiency of the incremental version with the shortfall‐from‐due‐care way of defining negligence.     

More on parametric characterizations of risk aversion and prudence

Summary. This note provides an alternative proof for the equivalence of decreasing absolute prudence (DAP) in the expected utility framework and in a two-parametric approach where utility is a function of the mean and the standard deviation. In addition, we elucidate that the equivalence of DAP and the concavity of utility as a function of mean and variance, which was shown to hold for normally distributed stochastics in Lajeri and Nielsen [4], cannot be generalized. Received: November 27, 2000; revised version: November 26, 2001 Correspondence to: T. Eichner     

Revisiting Savage in a conditional world

Summary. I present an axiomatization of subjective expected utility and Bayesian updating in a conditional decision problem. This result improves our understanding of the Bayesian standard from two perspectives: 1) it uses a set of axioms which are weak and intuitive; 2) it provides a formal proof to results on the relation between dynamic consistency, expected utility and Bayesian updating which have never been explicitly proved in a fully subjective framework. Received: December 1, 2000; revised version: February 26, 2001     

THE BECKER PARADOX AND TYPE I VERSUS TYPE II ERRORS IN THE ECONOMICS OF CRIME*

Two real‐world observations are not easily replicated in models of crime. First, although capital punishment is optimal in the standard Becker model, it is rarely observed in the real world. Second, criminal procedure and the evaluation of evidence vary across societies and historical periods, the standard of proof being sometimes very high and sometimes quite low. In this article, we develop a general equilibrium model of judicial procedure allowing for innocent persons being convicted. We show that the median voter theorem applies to this model, making judicial procedure endogenous. So formulated, the model can replicate both empirical observations.     

INCENTIVES FOR COMPETITIVE RESPONSES IN REPLICATED ECONOMIES: A GENERALIZATION

A simple proof is presented of a theorem of Roberts and Postlewaite on truthful revelation of preferences for replicated economies. The proof provides some generalizations of the earlier result using the strict definition of feasibility. First, to economies with an infinity of agents but with a finite number of types; secondly, to economies with a countable number of commodities.     

Managed care, quality of care, and patient rights

The growth of managed care has been accompanied by calls for increased government regulation because HMOs and other forms of managed care are seen by the public as more concerned about controlling costs than with protecting the rights of patients to quality care. This paper applies a theory of health care rights and clinical evidence of managed care quality in an analysis of public opinion about managed care. The paper concludes that there is no persuasive evidence that managed care has resulted in a general deterioration in the quality of care and that, with one exception, restrictions imposed by managed care plans are consistent with a theory of health care rights. The paper concludes with the recommendation that public policy should dispense with attempts to fine tune managed care and address an unquestionable violation of health care rights, the failure to guarantee a minimum standard of care to some 43 million Americans.     

The Economics of Taxation in Casino Tourism with Cross‐border Market Power

This paper provides a theoretical proof that casino taxation may have great potential as a contributor to tourism efficiency under sufficient market power. We also examine empirical evidence for the economic efficiency of casino tourism in Macao even with a “high” tax owing to geographic market power. Both theory and evidence point to such power as a key factor that affects the ability of a tourism resort to pass along local taxes to gambling visitors. This ability makes all the difference between the good or bad effect of casino taxes on tourism development. The policy implication is that a gaming tax should be lowered to support casino businesses if it is inefficient, but can be raised to extract public revenues if it is efficient.     

A second warning by the club of Rome

The growth of managed care has been accompanied by calls for increased government regulation because HMOs and other forms of managed care are seen by the public as more concerned about controlling costs than with protecting the rights of patients to quality care. This paper applies a theory of health care rights and clinical evidence of managed care quality in an analysis of public opinion about managed care. The paper concludes that there is no persuasive evidence that managed care has resulted in a general deterioration in the quality of care and that, with one exception, restrictions imposed by managed care plans are consistent with a theory of health care rights. The paper concludes with the recommendation that public policy should dispense with attempts to fine tune managed care and address an unquestionable violation of health care rights, the failure to guarantee a minimum standard of care to some 43 million Americans.     

A simple proof of the necessity of the transversality condition

Summary. This note provides a simple proof of the necessity of the transversality condition for the differentiable reduced-form model. The proof uses only an elementary perturbation argument without relying on dynamic programming. The proof makes it clear that, contrary to common belief, the necessity of the transversality condition can be shown in a straightforward way. Received: January 22, 2001; revised version: April 2, 2001     

The regional impact of health care expenditure: the case of Italy

Decentralization invests the subcentral authorities of a country with autonomy in political and economic power the exercise of which may widen interregional divergence and inequality. This paper provides evidence demonstrating that in the case of Italy the central government's policies for rationalization and containment of the growth of health care expenditure in combination with decentralization in the administration and provision of health care have resulted in interregional inequality, aggravating the existing regional divergence.     

Equilibrium Existence and Uniqueness in Public Good Models: An Elementary Proof via Contraction

This paper presents a proof for existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium of a public good model that exploits a simple contraction mapping. The proof establishes both existence and uniqueness in a single exercise that provides intuition about sufficiency. The method of proof is applied not only to the basic pure public good model but also to the impure model. In the latter model, income normality does not play the same pivotal role for existence and uniqueness.     

The cyclical response of employment to output changes: United States manufacturing industries, 1948 to 1983

This paper provides new evidence on the income elasticity of health care by combining stationarity and cointegration tests of health care expenditure and incomes with estimates of the cointegrating relationship between them. A recently updated dataset of health care expenditures and disposable personal income for the US states for the years 1966–1998 is used. The principal findings are that health care expenditures and incomes at the state level are non-stationary and cointegrated. Dynamic OLS cointegrating regressions of the pooled state time series estimate the income elasticity of health care at 0.817 to 0.844, well below unity, confirming that health care expenditure, even at the aggregate level, is a necessity good.     

Existence of a Condorcet Winner When Voters Have Other‐Regarding Preferences

In standard political economy models, voters are “self‐interested” that is, care only about “own” utility. However, the emerging evidence indicates that voters often have “other‐regarding preferences” (ORP), that is, in deciding among alternative policies voters care about their payoffs relative to others. We extend a widely used general equilibrium framework in political economy to allow for voters with ORP, as in Fehr and Schmidt (1999) . In line with the evidence, these preferences allow voters to exhibit “envy” and “altruism,” in addition to the standard concern for “own utility.” We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a Condorcet winner when voters have ORP. This could open the way for an incorporation of ORP in a variety of political economy models. Furthermore, as a corollary, we give more general conditions for the existence of a Condorcet winner when voters have purely selfish preferences.     

NEW FORMS OF PROVIDER IN THE ENGLISH NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE

ABSTRACT 1 : A wide ranging set of reforms is being introduced into the English National Health Service (NHS). They are designed to increase the market‐like behaviour of providers of care with a view to improving efficiency, quality and responsiveness of services. This paper is concerned with one aspect of those reforms: namely the policy to increase the diversity of types of providers of care to NHS patients. In this context, increasing diversity means that providers will not all be standard publicly owned NHS organizations. They can be publicly owned but autonomous, or independent (both in for‐profit and not for profit). The paper discusses the wide range of organizational forms available, analyzing their governance structures It then discusses the small amount of evidence currently available about the performance of diverse providers of health care.     

A welfare reform based on help for working parents

The Help for Working Parents Plan-developed by Dr. Heidi Hartmann and Dr. Barbara Bergmann in collaboration with the Economists' Policy Group for Women's Issues, which they co-chair – offers an innovative welfare reform program that encouragesjob holding, and sustains working parents and their children in decency. The HWP provides benefits to both single- and dual-parent households, to families who are under the poverty line and to those who waver along it. Increased child care and health care benefits, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and housing assistance are the critical components of the HWP plan – elements which will afford low-wage workers the opportunity to attain an above-poverty standard of living. It also provides a low-cash fallback option to parents who do not work for pay or are unemployed. Bergmann and Hartmann estimate that 60 percent of welfare recipients would work if the HWP plan were implemented.     

URBANIZATION AND HEALTH CARE IN RURAL CHINA

Strong economic growth has led to remarkable urbanization in China. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study provides the first empirical evidence documenting the impact of urbanization on rural health care and insurance. The primary finding is that urbanization leads to a significant and equitable increase in insurance coverage, which in turn plays a critical role in access to care. In addition, adverse selection exists in the demand for insurance. Income is also a significant determinant of insurance coverage. This study concludes that urbanization can help make substantial changes in rural health care and insurance status.     

Another direct proof of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem

This paper provides a new and direct proof of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem based on induction on the number of individuals.     

The fuzzy core and the (\Pi, \beta)-balanced core

Summary. This note provides a new proof of the non-emptiness of the fuzzy core in a pure exchange economy with finitely many agents. The proof is based on the concept of -balanced core for games without side payments due to Bonnisseau and Iehlé (2003).Received: 8 May 2003, Revised: 8 August 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D51, C71.Helpful comments of Jean-Jacques Herings and Hans Peters are gratefully acknowledged.     

论证据法学的学科称谓与归属

在证据法学基本范畴之系列中,首要的范畴就是＂证据法学＂本身这个概念问题。论者结合历史研究和语义分析,对＂证据法学＂作为一个范畴的称谓选择、基本含义、学科归属以及主要内容体系进行了研究和阐述。选取＂证据法学＂这个称谓是正确的,证据法学是指对证据运用（证明）的立法和实践进行理论概括的法学学科,其理论体系应当完整地包括基础论、证明论和证据论三大板块。