Can a Mixed Health Care System be Desirable on Equity Grounds?*

Should health care provision be public, private, or both? We consider this question in a setting where people differ in their earnings capacity and face some illness risk. We assume that illness reduces an individual's time endowment when waiting for treatment. Treatment can be obtained in a competitive private sector (through private insurance) or in the National Health Service (NHS) where it is provided free of charge but after some (endogenous) waiting time. The equilibrium in the health care sector consists of a waiting time in the NHS such that no patient wants to switch health care provider. This equilibrium is governed by two public policies: the income tax system and the size of the NHS. We find that: (i) a mixed system with a small NHS is never desirable; (ii) actuarially fair sickness insurance is never desirable either; (iii) a mixed system with a sufficiently large NHS may improve on a pure public system if the dispersion of earnings capacities is large enough; and (iv) the welfare gains from such a mixed system are not likely to be significant.     

Home Equity Conversion Instruments with Fixed Term to Maturity: Alternatives to End of Term Pay-Off

Standard reverse annuity mortgages obligate the lender to take on the risk that an elderly homeowner will desire to remain in a residence after the RAM has reached maturity. In this case, the best the lender can hope for is that the property will have appreciated sufficiently that the loan can be carried at interest only. There is a possibility for lender loss but not gain over contracted return.
Alternatives to the standard RAM are explored in this paper with most attention devoted to shared appreciation and shared equity RAMs. These alternative instruments appear to solve the problem of maturity risk.     

Labor Mobility, Trade, and Social Capital

Labor market integration raises welfare in the absence of distortions. This paper examines labor and goods market integration in a general‐equilibrium model with social capital. The findings are: (i) labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare, and raises it if the goods and labor skills are sufficiently different; (ii) compared to Pareto optimum, labor mobility (social capital) is excessively large (depleted); (iii) trade is superior to labor market integration if trading costs are no higher than private migration costs, otherwise the outcome is ambiguous; and (iv) the creation of new institutions in response to labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare.     

The Valuation of Semiannual Bonds between Interest Payment Dates: A Correction

This note provides a correction to Taylor's 1988 work on the valuation of semiannual coupon bonds between interest payment dates. It shows that the discrepancy in values between Taylor's model and the standard Wall Street pricing formula is much smaller than indicated by Taylor and is unlikely to generate opportunities for arbitrage profits.     

Sur une loi de probabilité considérée par J. F. Steffensen

Abstract

Dans ce même périodique, vous avez considéré¹, à la page 7, la loi de probabilité de deux variables aléatoires X, Y,² où la probabilité élémentaire ?(x, y) dx dy pour que X et Y soient respectivement compris entre x et x + dx, y et y + dy, est de la forme où K, a ₁, a ₂, b ₁, b ₂ sont des constantes. Nous nous proposons, dans ce qui suit, d'apporter quelques compléments à votre exposé.     

Price Transmission and Threshold Behavior in the African Catfish Supply Chain in Uganda

Abstract

The issue of price linkage in the catfish supply chain in Uganda is important because catfish has become an important traded species with exports to regional markets rising even faster than production, yet limited research has been undertaken to understand the linkages and the non-linearity in the price transmission mechanism. This paper explores the issue using monthly price data from January 2006 to August 2013, and applies threshold autoregressive approaches to test for the existence of a long-run relationship and price asymmetry. The results show that prices in the catfish value chain are tied together by a long-run relationship. It is also revealed that ex-vessel and wholesale price adjustments to retail price changes are symmetric while ex-vessel price adjustments to wholesale price changes are shown to be asymmetric. The direction of causal relationships was observed from the retail to the wholesale and ex-vessel markets, indicating that retailers are the price leaders in the Uganda catfish supply chain.     

全球非均衡复苏下: 美联储政策转向对新兴市场和发展中经济体的影响与应对

目前全球非均衡复苏的趋势越来越明显.新冠肺炎疫苗接种速度缓慢对新兴市场和发展中经济体的复苏进程产生了较为严重的负面影响.美国等主要发达经济体不断增大的通货膨胀压力、美联储货币政策突然转向、美元持续走强等因素可能对新兴市场和发展中经济体形成冲击.世界各国政府应提前做好应对准备,密切关注美联储及其他主要发达国家货币政策变动情况,改善向新兴市场和发展中经济体的流动性供给机制,及时足量地向其提供新冠肺炎疫苗,增加对其基础设施建设投资,以降低全球复苏的非均衡性.     

The impact of customer-specific marketing expenses on customer retention and customer profitability

We study the effects of customer-specific marketing expenses on customer retention and customer profitability in a business-to-business setting. Using data from a company providing hygiene services, we look at the impact of a hitherto unstudied type of expense targeted at individual customer relationships: the offering of free equipment to customers. The data allow tracking the activities performed in more than 4,500 customer relationships over a period of 4 years. Retention rates are higher for customers targeted with free equipment, but this effect results from an interaction with customer size. First-order dynamic panel data analyses show that the impact of targeted marketing expenses on customer dollar profit is positive for large customers, but there is no effect for smaller customers. Thus, targeted marketing expenses seem to be a tool for relationship maintenance rather than customer development: they help in retaining large customers that generate more profit, but they do not seem to work in developing new customers into larger, more profitable ones.