The Effects of Offering Health Plan Choice Within Employment-Based Purchasing Groups

Employers may offer employees a choice of health plans either to promote competition among plans or to better cater to employee preferences for different types of products. This article examines whether the relationship between the availability of choice and insurance costs and coverage are consistent with these models of employer behavior. The results indicate that employers who offer choice have lower average premiums, primarily because employees are enrolled in less generous plans, and cover a greater proportion of workers than those who do not. The results are consistent with employers offering choice to accommodate diverse worker preferences.     

Assessing Benefits from Department of Health and National Health Service Research & Development

Public services in the UK are increasingly expected to account for their outputs and performance. This article describes a retrospective evaluation of the benefits from the R&D funded by a regional office of the NHS Executive. The methods adopted enabled the various elements of the region's R&D portfolio to be examined and provided a basis for the development of a plan for regular monitoring. The proposals for implementation are now also feeding into a debate as to how health services R&D might best be monitored nationally in a way that is compatible with the norms and practices of research in other contexts.     

Member Plan Choice and Migration in Response to Changes in Member Premiums after Massachusetts Health Insurance Reform

In 2006 Massachusetts implemented a substantial reform of its health insurance market that included a new program for uninsured individuals with income between 100% of Federal Poverty (the upper limit for state Medicaid benefits) and 300% of Federal Poverty. Enrollment was compulsory for all citizens because of a mandate. Consumers who enrolled in this program, which offered generous benefits with low copays, received graduated subsidies depending on their income. Five insurers were contracted to underwrite the program, and consumers were able to choose their insurer. Insurers bid annually, and the member contribution was set according to an affordability schedule for the lowest-bidding insurer. Consumers could choose from the range of insurers, but if they chose a plan other than the lowest cost, their contributions reflected the difference. Premiums were changed annually at July 1, and members were eligible to move to a different plan at this date; a number of members migrated each year. This study aims to quantify the effect of this premium-induced switching behavior. Prior studies of member switching behavior have looked at employer plans and estimated the elasticity of response to changes in member contributions. The Massachusetts environment is unique in that there is a mandate (so being uninsured is not an option) and members may choose insurer but not benefit plan. Thus a study of migration in Massachusetts is uniquely able to quantify the effect of price (contribution rates) on member switching behavior. We find elasticity averaging ?0.21 for 2013 (the last year of the study) to be somewhat lower (in absolute value) than previous studies of employer populations. Elasticity has also been significantly increasing with time and appeared to have at least doubled over the studied period (i.e., 2008–2013). Prior studies have estimated higher elasticities in the range ?0.3 to ?0.6. We found that the data contained many outliers in terms of both changes in contributions and percentage of members switching plans. The effect of outliers was moderated by the choice of robust regression models, leading us to question whether other studies may have been affected by outliers, leading to overestimates of the elasticities.     

Portfolio Choice and Asset Prices: The Importance of Entrepreneurial Risk

Using cross-sectional data from the SCF and Tax Model, we show that entrepreneurial income risk has a significant influence on portfolio choice and asset prices. We find that households with high and variable business income hold less wealth in stocks than other similarly wealthy households, although they constitute a significant fraction of the stockholding population. Similarly for nonentrepreneurs, holding stock in the firm where one works reduces the portfolio share of other common stocks. Finally, we show that adding proprietary income to a linear asset pricing model improves its performance over a similar model that includes only wage income.     

The Role of Correlated Trading in Setting REIT Prices

This study investigates the role of correlated trading by individuals in setting equity real estate investment trust (REIT) prices. Consistent with existing literature, this study finds that there is a common element in correlated trades that drives both traditional closed-end fund prices and REIT prices. Perhaps more important, we find evidence suggesting that (1) the effects of correlated trading on REIT prices are stronger for those REITs that are hypothesized to be preferred by individual investors, and (2) this linkage is stronger when the REIT market is hot and exuberant; i.e., when the average share turnover in the REIT market is high.     

加拿大低收入家庭保障计划对我国的启示——从完善最低生活保障制度的视角

加拿大拥有覆盖全民待遇优厚的社会保障系统,其中的低收入家庭保障计划针对低收入家庭的不同情况,设有税收减免补贴、儿童福利金、养老保障收入补贴、住房补贴等各种个性化救助项目,同时该计划以政府财政为支付保障、鼓励社会力量参与,基本实现了对低收入人群的全面救助,对加拿大社会和经济的稳定发展起到了重要作用。分析加拿大的低收入家庭保障计划,总结其先进经验,对完善我国最低生活保障制度具有一定的启示。     

The Role of Prices for Excludable Public Goods

When a public good is excludable it is possible to charge individuals for using the good. We study the role of prices for publicly provided excludable public goods within an extension of the Stern-Stiglitz version of the Mirrlees optimal income tax model.We show that for a public consumer good there is a range of circumstances in which charging a price for the public good decreases welfare. We find that a necessary condition for a positive price to be desirable is that the marginal valuation of the public good is increasing in leisure. However, even under this condition, welfare is initially decreasing in the price, implying that charging a lower than optimal price may be less efficient than setting a zero price. Thus, even when there is a case for charging a price for the public good, an attempt to implement the optimum in practice may be risky, as even setting a modest price to avoid overshooting the optimum may be Pareto inferior to charging no price at all. The policy case for a price may thus appear rather weak. We also find that producers using an intermediate excludable public good as an input should not be charged a price for using the good.     

Prices and Protocols in Public Health Care

This article addresses the problem of how to determine the optimalallocation of public expenditure in the health sector. The firstpart poses the question: How should the set of services providedin the public health care system and the fees charged for thembe chosen to maximize the health status of the population witha fixed budget? First, the findings show that policy reformshould take into account the response of the private sector.Substituting for a reasonably well-functioning private sectoris not as valuable as providing services the private sectorcannot. Second, the assumptions needed to justify the cost-effectivenessof medical interventions as a criterion for setting prioritiesare so restrictive as to make this method usable in few, ifany, circumstances. Third, prices for any one service shouldbe set to balance the conflicting goals of encouraging its useand of conserving the budget for more effective services. The second part broadens the objective of policy to cover thestandard welfare economics concerns of utility and market failure,that latter being extensive in the health sector. It reexamineswelfare maximization rules to show that only the market failurecomponents of shadow prices are needed to calculate the welfaregains from public investments.     

放长线钓大鱼--瑞典斯堪的亚保险公司高级副总裁管文柏谈中国战略

中国保险的魅力在未来,不能只看这两年 "今年年底我们有望拿到营业执照,争取在2003年底前,正式开始营业."日前,在北京长安俱乐部举行的公司形象大使--世界乒乓冠军瓦尔德内尔--的媒体见面会上,斯堪的亚保险公司高级副总裁管文柏对媒体透露说.     

On Quality and Variety Bias in Aggregate Prices

How do product variety and quality affect the aggregate price bias? We develop a general equilibrium model that accounts for the joint interaction of product quality and variety. Our findings show that the aggregate price bias is procyclical and the contribution of product variety is persistent whereas the contribution of product quality becomes countercyclical in the medium to long run. We show that accounting for product quality and variety has critical implications on the measure of cyclical fluctuations. Measurements of cyclical fluctuations derived using the consumption deflator, which abstracts from changes in product quality and variety, underestimate the variables' true volatility.     

The Relative Importance of Audit Quality Attributes

Corporate collapses and audit failures have threatened the credibility of the audit function, with audit quality once again being a major issue. Motivated by the significance of auditing and perceptions of audit quality in enhancing the reliability and credibility of financial statements, this article investigates the relative importance of audit team and audit firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality by users of audit services. Data are gathered from 81 users of audit services and analysed using adaptive conjoint analysis in order to measure the relative importance of audit team and audit firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality. The results show that, in general, users of audit services perceive audit team attributes as being relatively more important than audit firm attributes in perceptions of audit quality. The findings of the study have implications for regulators and the accounting profession concerned with improving confidence in corporate governance and the effectiveness and integrity of the audit process, and for audit firms in monitoring and promoting the quality of their audit services.     

The Role of Information and Opportunism in the Choice of Buyer-Supplier Relationships

An important characteristic of any buyer-supplier relationship is the amount and type of information that is exchanged between the contracting parties. Buyer-supplier networks are characterized by greater information exchange than arm's-length transactions. This enhanced information exchange allows for greater production efficiency but increases the potential for information misappropriation. In this paper we characterize the set of innovations for which each of these forms of exchange relationships is efficient. We then explore the effect of an initial information linkage between the buyer and supplier. Such linkages increase the set of innovations for which networks are efficient. However, such linkages have a negative effect on the buyer's incentive to innovate and an ambiguous effect on the supplier's incentive to invest in flexible production techniques. Finally, we identify settings in which the buyer-supplier surplus is greater with such linkages.     

Optimal Monetary Policy Rules and House Prices: The Role of Financial Frictions

We probe the scope for reacting to house prices in simple and implementable monetary policy rules, using a New Keynesian model with a housing sector and financial frictions on the household side. We show that the social‐welfare‐maximizing monetary policy rule features a reaction to house price variations, when the latter are generated by housing demand or financial shocks. The sign and size of the reaction crucially depend on the degree of financial frictions in the economy. When the share of constrained agents is relatively small, the optimal reaction is negative, implying that the central bank must move the policy rate in the opposite direction with respect to house prices. However, when the economy is characterized by a sufficiently high average loan‐to‐value ratio, then it becomes optimal to counter house price increases by raising the policy rate.     

注册会计师在银行业服务市场中的作用与发展

银行业是一个最需要信用和公众信心的行业,而注册会计师的作用之一就是提供信用的评价和鉴证。所以,注册会计师的服务与银行业有着本质上的紧密联系。笔者认为,我国注册会计师为银行业服务的市场空间非常广阔,这种广阔来源于我国金融业的迅猛发展以及目前乃至未来数年内银行业在金融业中不可动摇的主导地位,来源于国际权威机构对注册会计师在保持银行体系稳定性中重要作用的认同以及我国法律法规对注册会计师在银行业服务市场中地位的日益明确和重视。一、注册会计师在银行业发展中的作用及其国际惯例国际银行业权威机构巴塞尔委员会早在198…     

Circumstance and Choice: The Role of Initial Conditions and Policies in Transition Economies

This article takes an integrated approach to evaluating theinteraction of initial conditions, political change, reformsand economic performance in a unified framework covering 28transition economies in East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe,and the fsu. Initial conditions and economic policy jointlydetermine the large differences in economic performance amongtransition economies. Initial conditions dominate in explaininginflation, but economic liberalization is the most importantfactor determining differences in growth. Political reform emergesas the most important determinant of the speed and comprehensivenessof economic liberalization, raising the important question ofwhat determines political liberalization. Results suggest theimportance of the level of development in determining the decisionto expand political freedoms.     

The Effect of Information Quality on Optimal Portfolio Choice

Three types of agents acting on different information sets are considered: fully informed agents, insiders, and outsiders. Differences in information quality are shown to affect the properties of their optimal portfolios. For an outsider, the share of wealth invested in the stock is decreasing in the variance of the stock. However, for an insider, the effect of an increasing stock variance on the optimal portfolio weight is ambiguous. In a calibration to U.S. data, the confidence intervals of the insider's demand for the stock converge, whereas the outsider's confidence intervals become wider.     

The Role of Multiple Large Shareholders in the Choice of Debt Source

This paper examines the effect of multiple large shareholders (MLS) on debt choice. Using a sample of 654 French‐listed firms over the period 1998‐2013, we find that reliance on bank debt increases with the presence and voting power of MLS. This result is robust to endogeneity concerns and to several sensitivity tests. Moreover, we find that the effect of MLS on debt choice is more pronounced when agency problems between controlling and minority shareholders are more severe. Taken together, our results suggest that MLS reduce the controlling owner's incentive to avoid bank monitoring, leading to greater reliance on bank debt.     

The Reaction of Investors and Stock Prices to Insider Trading

Trading by corporate insiders and their tippees is analyzed in Anheuser-Busch's 1982 tender offer for Campbell Taggart. Court records that identify insider transactions are used to disentangle the individual insider trades from liquidity trades. Consistent with previous studies, insider trading was found to have had a significant impact on the price' of Campbell Taggart. However, the impact of informed trading on the market is complicated. Trading volume net of insider purchases rose. Contrary to the broad implications of adverse selection models, Campbell Taggart's liquidity improved when the insiders were active in the market, and the insiders received superior execution for their orders.