LE RENOUVELLEMENT PÉRIODIQUE DES CONTRATS DE CONCESSION: LE CAS DES SERVICES DE L'EAU

RESUME ** :  Le renouvellement régulier des contrats de concession apparaît nécessaire pour bénéficier de concurrence dans certains secteurs, comme l'eau. Nous décrivons les contrats et la règle de renouvellement optimaux dans ce contexte. Ils arbitrent entre les diminutions de coûts, en cas de changement de concessionnaire, et les incitations à investir à long terme du concessionnaire en place. La meilleure information du concessionnaire en place sur des éléments constituant une valeur commune de la concession est importante. Nous montrons que ses conséquences diffèrent fortement du cas des enchères de biens.     

Healthcare costs of stroke and major bleeding in patients with atrial fibrillation treated with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants

Objective: To assess long-term healthcare costs related to ischemic stroke and systemic embolism (stroke/SE) and major bleeding (MB) events in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) treated with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs).

Materials and methods: Optum’s Clinformatics Data Mart database from 1/2009–12/2016 was analyzed. Adult patients with ≥1 stroke/SE hospitalization (index date) were matched 1:1 to patients without stroke/SE (random index date), based on propensity scores. Patients with an MB event were matched to patients without MB. All patients had an NOAC dispensing overlapping index date, ≥12?months of eligibility pre-index date, and ≥1 NVAF diagnosis. The observation period spanned from the index date until the earliest date of death, switch to warfarin, end of insurance coverage, or end of data availability. Mean costs were evaluated: (1) per-patient-per-year (PPPY) and (2) at 1, 2, 3, and 4?years using Lin's method.

Results: The cost differences were, respectively, $48,807 and $28,298 PPPY for NOAC users with stroke/SE (n?=?1,340) and those with MB (n?=?3,774) events compared to controls. Cost differences of patients with vs without stroke/SE were $49,876, $51,627, $57,822, and $60,691 at 1, 2, 3, and 4?years post-index, respectively (p?p?Limitations: Limitations include unobserved confounders, coding and/or billing inaccuracies, limited sample sizes over longer follow-up, and the under-reporting of mortality for deaths occurring after 2011.

Conclusions: The incremental healthcare costs incurred by patients with vs without stroke/SE was nearly twice as high as those of patients with vs without MB. Moreover, each additional year up to 4?years after the first event was associated with an incremental cost for patients with a stroke/SE or MB event compared to those without an event.     

Foreign banks in Japan: A study of a Japanese deregulation process

The deregulation of foreign banks in Japan, although corresponding in broad outline to world-wide trends, has diverged substantially in many particulars from patterns seen elsewhere. It has tended to be excruciatingly slow and piecemeal and to have been of minimal benefit to foreign banks. A review of this process leads to the conclusion that these characteristics result from organisational and political-bureaucratic factors inherent to the Japanese style of government which is, in turn, partially a reflection of Japanese culture. Although these non-economic factors have influenced the specific pattern of change, its overall direction appears to have been consistent with the broader national interest.The authors wish to acknowledge financial support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Florsheimer Center for Policy Studies, and the Krueger Center for Financial Research.     

Central bank disclosure as a macroprudential tool for financial stability

The Basel Capital Accord (pillar 3) states that disclosure of information (transparency) is essential to financial stability. This study analyzes, through inflation reports, the disclosure of information from the Central Bank of Brazil concerning the credit market. We consider credit risk and capital buffers as measures of financial stability in this analysis. Furthermore, in order to measure the perception of the monetary authority on the credit market, we built two indices based on the central bank’s communication on credit development. We performed a panel data analysis based on a sample of 125 banks for the period from June 1999 to September 2014 (7000 observations). The findings suggest that central bank communication regarding expectations concerning the credit market contributes to financial stability. Therefore, this kind of communication of central banks (about credit development) may constitute an important macroprudential tool to improve financial stability.     

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE ON ENGLISH AUCTIONS: ORAL OUTCRY VERSUS CLOCK

This paper tests experimentally, in a common value setting, the equivalence between the Japanese English auction (or clock auction) and an oral outcry auction where bidders are allowed to call their own bids. We find that (i) bidding behaviour is different in each type of auction, but also that (ii) this difference in bidding behaviour does not affect significantly the auction prices. This lends some support to the equivalence between these two types of auction. The winner's curse is present: overbidding led to higher than expected prices (under Nash bidding strategies) in both types of auction. Although interesting and encouraging, the results clearly indicate that further research is necessary, particularly with a modified experimental design.     

Changes in Global Trade Patterns and Women's Employment in Manufacturing, 1995–2011

This study investigates the feminization and defeminization trends in manufacturing employment in thirty countries from 1995 to 2011. Utilizing two separate methods, structural decomposition analysis (SDA) and factor content analysis (FCA), the study identifies the major industries and trade partners behind the structural shifts in trade that have induced changes in employment and thus in the rates of women’s employment. The findings highlight that, as a general trend, defeminization in manufacturing has persisted in the Global North, led by a negative trade impact in low-technology industries. In the Global South, feminization and defeminization trends are not as straightforward. Despite positive changes in women’s share of employment in medium-high- and high-technology industries, negative gender bias effects of trade changes are found particularly in high-technology industries, where occupations are notably gendered.     

Foreign affiliates of the world largest financial groups: Locations and governance

This paper has two objectives. The first is the documentation of the relative importance of the largest financial groups in the world. The list of top 50 financial groups ranked by total assets in 2003 is compared to a similar list available for 1986. The second objective is to examine where financial firms are expanding their operations and to document some of the factors that may explain the most-favoured locations of these financial groups.The results of this study have two important implications. First, they indicate that location-specific advantages such as size, human capital and cultural distance, do provide an explication of the internationalization of financial firms. Second, they show that good governance has a strong impact on the choice of countries by firms.     

Discounting and welfare evaluation of policies

We start with the premise that if policy discounting is to have any welfare relevance, one has to accept it being a derivative of a social welfare function (SWF). We show that if that derivative is to have a net present value (NPV) form, then the baseline allocation must be stationary. In addition, we show that at a stationary baseline in an overlapping generations growth economy, the intergenerationally fair discount rate equals the growth rate of per‐capita consumption, which is, roughly, 2% for the United States. This differs from the interest rate, even in the golden rule equilibrium, unless population growth is null. The last result is based on the main theorem in Mertens and Rubinchik (2012) and is demonstrated for a policy space that might naturally arise in applications.