Health insurer market power and primary care consolidation

This paper analyzes how health insurance market concentration impacts the market structure of primary care physicians. In more concentrated insurance markets, physicians are found to work in larger practices and their practices are more likely to have a hospital with an ownership interest. Physicians are also less likely to report being in a competitive physician market, consistent with practice consolidation. Our results suggest that consolidation in insurance markets impacts the competitive structure of physician markets.     

Group concept mapping methodology: toward an epistemology of group conceptualization,complexity, and emergence

Quality & Quantity - Group concept mapping is a participatory mixed-methods approach to social and behavioral research that integrates qualitative group processes with multivariate statistical...     

Experts,firms, consumers or even hard data? Forecasting employment in Germany

In this article, we forecast employment growth for Germany with data for the period from November 2008 to November 2015. Hutter and Weber (2015) introduced an innovative unemployment indicator and evaluated the performance of several leading indicators, including the Ifo Employment Barometer (IEB), to predict unemployment changes. Since the IEB focuses on employment growth instead of unemployment developments, we mirror the study by Hutter and Weber (2015). It turns out that in our case, and in contrast to their article, the IEB outperforms their newly developed indicator. Additionally, consumers’ unemployment expectations and hard data such as new orders exhibit a high forecasting accuracy.     

Measuring the Unmeasured: Cultural Heritage Studies in Honor of Prof. Francesco Forte

This paper presents the contributions of Francesco Forte to the measurement of art and cultural goods and services, as I worked with him as his co-author. These contributions range from the valuation of art goods by the art matrix we conceived, to the valuation of the cultural welfare of nations, regions and local communities. Our work also assessed the provision of cultural welfare at the national, regional and local level for the public and non-profit sectors and measured the efficiency and effectiveness of museum bureaucracies. We also studied the profitability of investments in the arts by considering product life cycles, artistic movements and economies. More recently, with Michele Caputo, we focused on the long-run life cycle and success of the movie industry for select countries competing with foreign movie industries and TV entertainment by adopting Caputo’s fractional derivatives theory, which captures the role of past history. Professor Forte and I also developed the Differential Touristic Development Index to measure the effects of art and cultural enterprises as tourist attractions. The most innovative contributions of Francesco Forte to the measurement of the economic value of cultural goods and services demonstrate that it is possible to “measure the unmeasured,” and therein improve public collection of statistical data with the goal of increasing the preservation and valuation of cultural goods and services and highlighting their potential as economic multipliers.     

Birth,death and public good provision

We explore the effect of fixed versus dynamic group membership on public good provision. In a novel experimental design, we modify the traditional voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) by periodically replacing old members of a group with new members over time. Under this dynamic, overlapping generations matching protocol we find that average contributions experience significantly less decay over time relative to a traditional VCM environment with fixed group membership and a common termination date. These findings suggest that the traditional pattern of contribution and decay seen in many public goods experiments may not accurately reflect behavior in groups with changing membership, as is the case in many real-world environments.     

Learning CAD at university through summaries of the rules of design intent

The ease with which 3D CAD models may be modified and reused are two key aspects that improve the design-intent variable and that can significantly shorten the development timelines of a product. A set of rules are gathered from various authors that take different 3D modelling strategies into account. These rules are then applied to CAD strategic-knowledge learning methodology and included in 3D CAD modelling exercises for students following the degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Burgos (Spain). The experiment was conducted in two groups with a total of 75 students. The design-intent rules were introduced in the different exercises that the teacher explained in both the theoretical and the practical classes. In addition, a summary of the different design rules in each of the practical exercises was explained in the practical classes in only one of the groups. The experimental results, reported in this paper, tested the influence of these summaries on overall improvements in 3D modelling and on the design-intent variable, which is subdivided into four sections: skeleton, structures, alterations and constraints. The use of the summaries of the design intent rules led to statistically significant improvements in 3D modelling in the experimental group, in comparison with the group of students to whom those summaries were not explained.     

Does European development have Roman roots? Evidence from the German Limes

This paper contributes to the understanding of the long-run consequences of Roman rule on economic development. In ancient times, the area of contemporary Germany was divided into a Roman and a non-Roman part. The study uses this division to test whether the formerly Roman part of Germany are more developed than the non-Roman part. This is done using the Limes Germanicus wall as geographical discontinuity in a regression discontinuity design framework. The results indicate that economic development—as measured by luminosity—is indeed significantly and robustly larger in the formerly Roman part of Germany. The study identifies the persistence of the Roman road network until the present as an important factor causing this developmental advantage of the formerly Roman part of Germany both by fostering city growth and by allowing for a denser road network.