Estimating the Effect of Individual Time Preferences on the Use of Disease Screening

Economists have long been interested in evaluating the role that time preferences play in a wide range of economic decisions. In the health care arena, time preferences may be an especially important determinant of many decisions—particularly the use of preventative health care. One potential barrier to patient adoption of preventative screening regimens is that they impose current costs on consumers with the hope of lower costs in the future. Using data from a national survey, we jointly estimate latent discount rate and preventative service demand models using a limited information maximum likelihood estimator (iterated M‐estimator). The results suggest that discount rates are generally inversely related to the likelihood of most screening tests.     

Why don’t households see the light?: Explaining the diffusion of compact fluorescent lamps

Starting in 2009 the EU ban on the sale of incandescent bulbs will force households to purchase energy-saving compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). The impact of the ban on consumers will depend on the nature of current barriers to the use of CFLs. This paper employs a Double-Hurdle model to identify distinct barriers to household consideration of CFLs and to the subsequent intensity of adoption using a large survey of German households. Barriers to CFL consideration are found to be low for all households, except those with very low incomes. Barriers to CFL consideration are, however, strongly linked to the residential characteristics of low-income households like small size and to the lack of household knowledge of energy consumption. CFLs use will increase after the ban mainly through a rise in the intensity of adoption. But the ban will be costly to consumers because the range of applications where households chose to employ CFLs is limited, particularly for high income households.     

Do investment banks listen to their own analysts?

To what extent conflicts of interest affect the investment value of sell-side analyst research is an ongoing debate. We approach this issue from a new direction by investigating how asset-management divisions of investment banks use stock recommendations issued by their own analysts. Based on holdings changes around initiations, upgrades, and downgrades from 1993 to 2003, we find that these bank-affiliated investors follow recommendations from sell-side analysts in general, increasing (decreasing) their relative holdings following positive (negative) recommendations. More importantly, these investors respond more strongly to recommendations issued by their own analysts than to those issued by analysts affiliated with other banks, especially for recommendations on small and low-analyst-coverage firms. Thus, we find that investment banks “eat their own cooking,” showing that these presumably sophisticated institutional investors view sell-side recommendations as having investment value, particularly when the recommendations come from their own analysts.     

Modeling Spatial and Temporal House Price Patterns: A Comparison of Four Models

This research reports results from a competition on modeling spatial and temporal components of house prices. A large, well-documented database was prepared and made available to anyone wishing to join the competition. To prevent data snooping, out-of-sample observations were withheld; they were deposited with one individual who did not enter the competition, but had the responsibility of calculating out-of-sample statistics for results submitted by the others. The competition turned into a cooperative effort, resulting in enhancements to previous methods including: a localized version of Dubins kriging model, a kriging version of Clapps local regression model, and a local application of Cases earlier work on dividing a geographic housing market into districts. The results indicate the importance of nearest neighbor transactions for out-of-sample predictions: spatial trend analysis and census tract variables do not perform nearly as well as neighboring residuals.     

Addressing the Transfer-Pricing Problem in an Origin-Basis X Tax

In a previous paper I described how the tax design called the X Tax would facilitate an international tax system free of many of the complexities and avoidance opportunities plaguing the existing international tax regime and also have neutrality properties generally deemed desirable. A choice must, however, be made between two basic treatments of transborder business transactions—the origin and destination principles. The destination-principle approach sidesteps the need to identify arm's length terms of transborder transactions between related business entities—the transfer-pricing problem. This serious problem remains in the origin-principle approach, which, however, presents fewer challenges of monitoring the flow of goods and services across borders, obviates what I call the tourism problem whereby people can reduce their taxes by consuming in a low-tax jurisdiction and, arguably most important, avoids transition effects associated with introduction of the tax and subsequent tax rate changes that occur in the destination approach. In this paper I explore possible special rules for transborder transactions between related parties in an origin-based system to eliminate the transfer-pricing problem.     

Marketing and non-marketing materials sent by American Colleges and Universities

This report discusses educational marketing materials used by admissions offices in a random sample of 858 American colleges and universities. Information requested and received by a potential student is described and classified as marketing or non-marketing. This paper shows why four-year institutions and those offering higher degrees are significantly more likely than two-year colleges to use marketing materials in their responses to prospective students. The value of these findings for admissions offices and marketing specialists are presented.