Pricing policy of a U.S. telephone company

This paper analyses the pricing policy of a major U.S. telephone company in 1967. A mathematical programming model was used to calculate the prices per telephone call on each of three representative routes in each of four periods of the day which would be implied by a variety of alternative maximands (consumers' plus producers' surplus, profit, sales units, sales revenue), under a variety of alternative profit constraints and assuming capacity to be either fixed (at 1967 levels) or variable. Cost and demand data were supplied by several telephone company officials, and supplemented by published material. Sensitivity analysis was carried out on the demand elasticities. A total of one hundred versions of the model are reported on. Our major conclusions include: (i) Maximising consumers' plus producers' surplus subject to a pair of minimum profit constraints provided a good approximation to 1967 policy. (ii) There is perfect discrimination between large and small users for interstate toll calls. (iii) The effect of the state regulatory commission was to keep down the price of intrastate toll calls at the expense of interstate toll calls. (iv) As alternatives to regulation, perfect competition, if attainable, would increase benefits by about $100 million whereas perfect monopoly would reduce them by $300 million per annum, within the area of the company's operations.     

U.S. Universal Health Coverage at a Crossroad

Scheduled for 2014, implementation of universal coverage in the U.S. is not proceeding smoothly. Embroiled in bitter partisan conflict and absent decisive popular support, this costly new entitlement program, The Affordable Care Act commonly referred to as ObamaCare, is vulnerable to a major overhaul or possible rejection. National interest considerations urge that reformulation center on better matching the law’s aspirations with new realities rather than abstract ideals. Constraints on government spending and the risks public indebtedness pose for the national economy compel a pragmatic reassessment of entitlement policy in the light of what is affordable. ObamaCare compounds the government’s unsustainable debt and deficit problem, promising benefits that are overly generous and lack effective cost controls. Fiscal imperatives compel that scarce government resources be targeted on the truly needy and that individuals capable of doing so assume a greater responsibility for their health care. They also necessitate a more sophisticated public-private partnership than provided in the new health law in order to capture the benefits of market competition that facilitate innovation, circumvent political stalemate, confine the inflationary effects of services perceived to be free goods, and provide incentives that reward individuals for becoming more cost-conscious users of health services. Finally, the harnessing of self-interest is presented as a superior alternative to centralized command and control methods for influencing health behavior and keeping health spending under control. In the interest of economy and efficiency, government involvement, following the subsidization of low income persons on a sliding scale basis, should concentrate on standard setting, monitoring and evaluating productivity and quality improvement practices. Ultimately, living standards contribute more to health status than do health services, and this requires investment directed at economic growth.     

International benefits policy: a U.S. multinationals perspective

An international benefits policy requires considerable planning both at the corporate level and in relation to the local environment. The creation of such a policy also calls for careful research into the company's basic benefits philosophy.     

Does real U.K. GDP have a unit root? Evidence from a multi-century perspective

ABSTRACT

We employ linear and nonlinear unit-root tests to examine the stationarity of five multi-century historical U.K. series of real output compiled by the Bank of England. Three series span 1270 to 2016 and two series span 1700 to 2016. These datasets represent the longest span of historical real output data available and, thus, provide the environment for which unit-root tests are most powerful. A key feature of our test is its simultaneous allowance for two types of nonlinearity: time-dependent (structural breaks) nonlinearity and state-dependent (asymmetric adjustment) nonlinearity. The key finding of the test, contrary to what other more popular nonlinear unit-root tests suggest, provides strong evidence that the main structure of the five series is a stationary process characterized by an asymmetric nonlinear adjustment and a permanent break affecting both the intercept and the trend. A major policy implication of this finding is fiscal and/or monetary stabilization policies have only temporary effects on the output levels of the United Kingdom.     

Enriching U.S. labor results in a multi-regional CGE model

This paper proposes a new approach for enriching results for U.S. labor markets from the leading multi-regional CGE model, the GTAP model. Departing from the usual approach of expanding labor data in all economies in a model's database, our method expands only the U.S. labor data. Additionally, we introduce a novel modification to primary factor demands, generating more realistic labor markets in which lower-skilled jobs substitute more easily with other primary factors than higher-skilled jobs. The advantages of our approach are that we can rely on the most recent and the most disaggregate U.S. labor data available; we build upon the most recently available GTAP database; and, when applied to other economies, our approach is the initial contribution to a database of detailed labor statistics for several economies.