Health plan diagnostics: what plan sponsors and trustees need to know

The needed information for diagnosing the cost-effectiveness of the health plan includes understanding where cost pressures are coming from, how the plan compares to other plans and the key characteristics of the covered group. Allocating resources for the staff or consultants to produce and analyze this information is a wise investment. Two case studies illustrate the power of plan diagnostics to lead to positive solutions that address cost increases--without hurting plan members.     

A working paper from April 1985: Which demand elasticities do we know and which do we need to know for policy analysis?

This paper presents some results on the theory and estimation of intertemporal allocation mechanisms. The results rely heavily on the distinction between anticipated changes and unanticipated changes.     

Dishonesty: From parents to children

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economic approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts. We conduct an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects, exploring the roles of moral cost and scrutiny on dishonest behavior. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child. In this spirit, there is also an interesting, quite different, effect of children on parents’ behavior: parents act more honestly under the scrutiny of daughters than under the scrutiny of sons. This finding sheds new light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults, where a typical result is that females are more honest than males.     

The Contribution of Employment Separation to Teenage Unemployment*

In this paper we analyze the relationship between labour market flows and the unemployment rate of teenagers compared to males aged 25–54 years. For 1979–80 teenagers separated from employment at approximately five times the rate of adult males and this was the principal factor associated with their high rate of unemployment. Job-finding success from unemployment and from outside the labour force is approximately the same for each labour market group. A special feature is the analysis of gross flows between full-time and part-time employment. Labour market flows involving part-time employment account for little of the unemployment rate difference.     

论环境知情权

环境知情权在环境问题日益严重的今天有着重要的意义。文章在对环境知情权进行简要介绍的基础上,分析了环境知情权的结构,并结合外国立法经验对我国环境知情权制度的完善提出了若干建议。     

Empowering parents to improve education: Evidence from rural Mexico

We examine a very inexpensive program in Mexico that involves parents directly in the management of schools located in disadvantaged rural communities. The program, known as AGE, finances parent associations and motivates parental participation by involving them in the management of primary school grants. We find that AGE reduced grade failure by 7.4% and grade repetition by 5.5% in grades 1 through 3. However, while AGE was effective in poor communities, it had no effect in extremely poor communities.     

Teenage pregnancies and births in Germany: patterns and developments

We study the development of teenage fertility in East and West Germany using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and from the German Mikrozensus. Following the international literature we derive hypotheses on the patterns of teenage fertility and test whether they are relevant to the German case. We find that teenage fertility is associated with teenage age and education, with the income of the teenager’s family, with migration status, residence in East Germany and aggregate unemployment. Our evidence supports counter-cyclical teenage fertility.