Handling health-care costs in the '90s

Managed-care programs with utilization reviews may be the best approach to cost cutting. But to really curb costs, providers, insurers, employers and employees must form partnerships to overcome the outrageous inflation in the U.S. health-care system.     

Financial instability and the real economy

Summary The paper deals with three different areas of the financial sphere: national moneys, exchange rates and financial claims, markets and institutions. For each of them, it tries to identify the main forms of instability which may occur, their causes and consequences for the real economy. Depending on the area concerned, the forms of instability include inflation, fluctuations and misalignments in interest rates, exchange rates and asset prices and finally solvency and liquidity crises of institutions. It is concluded that, over the last fifteen years, significant progress has been made in the policy framework to counteract instabilities in the national and monetary spheres. The conclusion is more mixed with regard to the structure of financial markets.[/p]We are grateful to Julian Alworth, Svein Andresen, Gavin Bingham, Joe Bisignano, Michael Hutchison and Paul van den Bergh for useful comments.     

Life insurance for endowment--great concept or a booby trap?

Life insurance as a charitable gift is an attractive alternative. But first the fund raiser must check out the companies and the different types of policies available.     

Price Discovery and Risk Transfer in the Crude Oil Futures Market: Some Structural Time Series Evidence

This paper re-examines the Garbade and Silber (1983) model with the objective of finding out if the crude oil futures market performs the functions of price discovery and risk transfer. The model is estimated, using daily data, as a system of two seemingly unrelated time series equations allowing the coefficients to be time-varying. The empirical results reveal that the futures market performs about 60 per cent of the price discovery function, and that the elasticity of supply of arbitrage services is adequately high for the market to perform the risk transfer function.
(J.E.L: G13, C22).