Real-life cost of vitamin K antagonist treatment in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation in France in 2013

Aims: Data highlighting the cost drivers for non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) patients in terms of vitamin K antagonist (VKA) treatment and monitoring are lacking in France. This study aimed to evaluate the real-life daily cost of VKA treatment in 2013, in French patients suffering from NVAF.

Methods: This longitudinal observational study was performed using the EGB (Echantillon Généraliste des Bénéficiaires) database, a random sample of the French national insurance (NHI) database, which covers 80% of the population. All adult patients whose first NVAF anticoagulant treatment in 2013 was a VKA were analyzed. Costs were calculated for the duration of follow-up and then divided by the number of days of therapy. The analysis was performed both from the French NHI perspective (amount reimbursed by the NHI) and from a collective perspective.

Results: In this study, 3,254 NVAF patients treated with VKA in 2013 were included, and this sample comprised 52.6% males. The mean daily cost of VKA treatment was €1.13 (±1.18) according to the collective perspective (89.4% of this cost was associated to INR measurement) and €1.05 (±1.16) according to the NHI perspective.

Limitations: As diagnoses associated with procedures are not available in the EGB database, proxies were used, and an algorithm was created to define the AF population.

Conclusions: This analysis is the first to consider an exhaustive spectrum of the costs of VKA treatment in France using EGB data. VKA medication requires exhaustive follow-up, and, thus, associated costs are important. The results of the present study confirmed this close follow-up for VKA patients, making the cost of treatment by VKA nearly 10-times more expensive than the cost of medication itself.     

Heterogeneous Impact of Soil Contamination on Farmland Prices in the Belgian Campine Region: Evidence from Unconditional Quantile Regressions

We estimate a hedonic-pricing model using geo-coded farmland-transaction data from the Campine region, situated in the north-east of Belgium. Unlike previous hedonic studies, we use the method of unconditional quantile regression (Firpo et al., in Econometrica 77(3):953–973, 2009). An important advantage of this new method over the traditional conditional quantile regression (Koenker and Bassett, in Econometrica 46(1):33–50, 1978) is that it allows for the estimation of potentially heterogeneous effects of cadmium pollution along the entire (unconditional) distribution of farmland prices. Using a threshold specification of the hedonic-pricing model, we find evidence of a U-shaped valuation pattern, where cadmium pollution of the soil has a negative and significant impact on prices only in the middle range of the distribution, insofar as cadmium concentrations are above the regulatory standard of 2 parts per million for agricultural land. Results obtained from a probit model to classify land plots into different price segments further suggest that the heterogeneous impact of soil pollution on price can be directly related to the variety of amenities that farmland provides.     

The EU ETS and corporate environmental abatement

This article studies the relationship between firm-level emissions-to-cap ratio (ETC) and environmental abatement, by using a unique and extensive data set of 10 762 installations covered by the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) matched to 5931 firms. We find that a shortage of emissions allowances is related to more abatement in later years while a surplus of emissions allowances results in worse subsequent environmental performance. This finding underscores the importance of reducing the global amount of allowances in the ETS system. Our results also suggest that stakeholder pressure and the creation of transparency concerning corporate environmental performance are likely to support the effectiveness of the system.     

Religion and International Trade: Does the Sharing of a Religious Culture Facilitate the Formation of Trade Networks?

A bstract .   Despite interest in the influence of religion on economic activity by early economists like Adam Smith, modern economists have done little research on the subject. In light of the apparent religious fervor in many parts of the global economy, economists' seeming lack of interest in studying how religious cultures enhance or retard the globalization of economic activity is especially surprising. This article makes a contribution toward filling this void by examining how religion affects international trade. Specifically, we examine whether the sharing of religious cultures enables the formation of exchange networks that can overcome the failure or nonexistence of other social and economic institutions necessary for completing complex international transactions. We apply an expanded gravity model of international trade to control for a variety of factors that determine trade, and we use two recently developed regression methods, scaled OLS and nonlinear least squares, to exploit the model to its fullest. We find that the sharing of Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox Catholic, and Protestant cultures by people in different countries has a significantly positive influence on bilateral trade, all other things equal. The sharing of Roman Catholic culture has a significantly negative influence on bilateral trade, and the sharing of Islamic and Judaic cultures neither promotes nor discourages international exchange. These results suggest that some religious cultures are more conducive than others for forming international trade networks.     

Inter-market competition for exchange traded funds

We examine how the different mix of informed and liquidity trading in the market for ETFs affects the nature of inter-market competition. We find that both the characteristics of the securities and the structures of the competing markets jointly determine the nature of inter-market competition. Given the superior execution quality on the ECNs and the low adverse selection costs in the ETF market, anonymous market such as the ECNs, attract both liquidity and informed traders. We also find that markets compete in a subset of ETFs. In addition, we find that quotebased competition is prevalent in the market for ETFs.     

The scheduling and organization of periodic associative computation: Essential networks

This paper defines and characterizes essential decentralized networks for calculating the associative aggregate of one or more cohorts of data. A network is essential if it is not possible to eliminate an instruction or manager and still calulate the aggregate of each cohort. We show that for essential networks, the graphs that depict the operations and data dependencies are trees or forests. These results assist in the characterization of efficient networks. Received: 15 October 1994 / Accepted: 6 March 1997     

A critical test of the choice questionnaire for collecting informed public opinions

In the Choice Questionnaire (Neijens et al. 1992) respondents have to choose between several policy options. Within this questionnaire they are provided with information about the consequences of each option. Until now, only indirect evidence as to whether or not respondents base their preferences on the information provided was available and plausible alternative explanations for the Choice Questionnaire's effect could not be ruled out. In the present study, we demonstrate that Choice Questionnaire respondents do base their preferences on the information provided: different information resulted in significantly different choices.     

A never-decisive and anonymous criterion for optimal growth models

We address in this paper the question of the existence of a Social Welfare Function that would be sustainable and would allow us to obtain solutions to optimal growth models. We define sustainability by two new axioms called Never-decisiveness of the present and Never-decisiveness of the future. We first show that a SWF which has Never-decisiveness properties cannot be defined on a ball of $l_{\infty }^{+}$ . We must (i) restrict to the set of utility streams for which the value of the SWF is finite and (ii) introduce additional assumptions in order to obtain the Never-decisiveness properties. Our main result in this paper is therefore to show that the undiscounted utilitarian criterion is an anonymous and never-decisive criterion for optimal growth models. We consider the set of utilities of consumptions which are generated by a specific technology, namely a technology with decreasing returns for high levels of capital, and restrict ourselves to good programs, i.e., any program for which intertemporal utility is well defined.     

Understanding Empirical Boundaries: A Systems-Theoretical Avenue in Border Studies

The aim of this contribution is to present a conceptual framework with potential application across the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This framework should embrace interdisciplinarity and the contextual nature of borders. Based on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it elaborates an understanding of borders as being related to a dynamic process of social bordering/bounding processes that involves spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries. By introducing the notion of ‘empirical boundary’, our framework aspires to bridge the gap between (radical) constructivist theorising and the analysis of physical realities involved in the (re)production of boundaries.     

MONETARY VALUATION OF INSURANCE AGAINST FLOOD RISK UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE*

Climate change is projected to increase the risk of natural disasters, such as floods and storms, in certain regions. This is likely to raise the demand for natural disaster insurance. We present a stated preference survey using choice modeling with mixed logit estimation methods in order to examine the effects of climate change and the availability of government compensation on the demand for flood insurance by Dutch homeowners. Currently, no private insurance against flood damage is offered in the Netherlands. The results indicate that there are opportunities for the development of a flood insurance market.