A Socio-instutionalist Critique of the 1990s' Reforms of the United Kingdom's National Health Service

This paper argues that the on-going reforms to the UK's National Health Service initiated in the 1990s represent potentially profound institutional change to the values underpinning the process of care. The market-orientation of the reforms is highlighted, and it is asserted that the theoretical rationale for this is informed by the nascent neoclassical health economics and new institutionalist literatures, which exhibit utilitarian propensities in that both stress outcomes and at best relegate process. Drawing from the seminal contribution of Thorstein Veblen, the paper argues that market-oriented reform in the UK may induce a shift from a Hippocratic ethos to a more individualistic value system.     

Cattle as a consistently resilient agricultural commodity

This study compares a range of agricultural commodities over periods of varying economic circumstances. These commodities are examined over three categories, including returns, risk, and contribution to portfolio optimisation. Consistency in these categories is determined over four equal three-year stages which comprise pre-GFC (Global Financial Crisis), GFC, post-GFC and post-post GFC. To demonstrate resilience in the most extreme circumstances, the study uses Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), which measures extreme risk in the tail of a distribution, as the risk measure and risk-return optimiser. The study thus provides a unique and comprehensive extreme-risk based focus which identifies and ranks the consistency of performance of agricultural commodities over a range of criteria and conditions. Cattle commodities consistently demonstrate the strongest overall performance in the categories examined.     

Tail dependence between gold and sectorial stocks in China: perspectives for portfolio diversification

This article analyzes the relationship between gold quoted on the Shanghai Gold Exchange and Chinese sectorial stocks from 2009 to 2015. Using different copulas, our results show that there is weak but significant tail dependence between gold and Chinese sectorial stock returns. This means that the dependence between extreme movements of the two assets is not pronounced and confirms the role of gold as a safe haven asset. Based on analyzing the efficient frontier, CCC-GARCH optimal weights, hedge ratios and hedging effectiveness, we further show that adding gold into Chinese stock portfolios can help to reduce their risk. Gold appears to be the most efficient diversifier for stocks of the materials sector and the less efficient for the utilities sector. As a robustness check, we also compare gold to oil and indicate that gold is more efficient than oil in the diversification of Chinese stock portfolios.

     

On the existence of rational expectations equilibrium

We prove a theorem on the existence of rational expectations general economic equilibrium when agents condition on prices as well as on private information, and maximize the expectation of a state-dependent utility function. The key to the result is a new idealization of what it means for a set of empirical distributions to support agents' expectations. This idealization depends on the notion that agents compare their expectations with continuous versions of the random empirical distributions that are generated by the workings of the economy. The existence theorem covers all strictly concave utility functions, arbitrary distributions of the state variable, and situations in which the dimension of the state variable is large relative to the number of commodities.     

Factors Affecting the Content of High School Economics

Several years ago there was great interest in the high school economics course. Studies were being made of the effectiveness of high school economics, of the relationship between the student's high school economics background and his or her performance in the college principles course, and of the economic knowledge of precollege teachers. Strom's article may bring about a revival of interest in secondary school economic instruction. He has considered variables not previously taken into account, he has addressed the problem of defining the high school course, and—perhaps most important—he has suggested that the two-step factor analysis/regression procedure may be superior to the standard regression analysis in economic education research.     

Do people really want to be nudged towards healthy lifestyles?

This paper assesses Thaler and Sunstein’s claim that policies that nudge individuals towards healthy lifestyles promote the welfare of those individuals, as judged by themselves. I argue that Thaler and Sunstein switch between two different interpretations of that clause. One interpretation gives the clause a wide range of applicability, but drains it of its content as a repudiation of paternalism. The other interpretation makes it more meaningful to say that people want to make the choices they are being nudged towards, but applies to a much narrower range of cases than Thaler and Sunstein have in mind.