Exclusions of infertility treatment in the aftermath of Bragdon v. Abbott

This article analyzes the Supreme Court's decision in Bragdon v. Abbott to determine whether the Court's reading of ADA necessarily leads to the conclusion that a group health plan's or insurer's exclusion or limitation of coverage with respect to infertility is prohibited by ADA. The authors conclude that it may be advisable for plans to perform at least minimal actuarial calculations with respect to the current or anticipated costs of covering infertility treatments prior to adopting any exclusions or limitations of coverage.     

Outcomes from use of an evidence-based practice guideline

The aim of evidence-based guidelines is primarily to improve patient outcomes without adding to the existing cost of care because both payers and policymakers want to identify health care costs that do not result in benefit to the patient. The purpose of the reported project was to generate a practice guideline for the treatment of uncomplicated acute cystitis in a female population, to determine the extent to which the guideline would be used by providers and to measure the cost and quality of outcomes from its use. A retrospective chart review was used to gather pre-guideline practice and cost data. Measurements included the type, frequency, and duration of antibiotic therapy and the use of urine cultures and both complications and routine followup visits. The implementation of an outpatient practice guideline resulted in a significant change in antibiotic prescribing and a trend toward a change in ordering cultures and clinic followup. There was also a significant decrease in treatment costs.     

Optimal dividend policy and growth option

We analyse the interaction between the dividend policy and the decision on investment in a growth opportunity of a liquidity constrained firm. This leads us to study a mixed singular control/optimal stopping problem for a diffusion that we solve quasi-explicitly by establishing a connection with an optimal stopping problem. We characterize situations where it is optimal to postpone the distribution of dividends in order to invest at a subsequent date in the growth opportunity. We show that uncertainty and liquidity shocks have an ambiguous effect on the investment decision.      

The Allocation of Governmental Regulatory Authority: Federalism and the Case of Insurance Regulation

We investigate the incentives states have to provide insurance regulatory services in an efficient manner. Regulation of the insurance industry in the United States is unique, as it is conducted primarily at the state level whereas the majority of insurance sales are interstate. Consistent with predictions from the federalism literature, we find evidence of trans‐state externalities, as states with small domestic insurance markets are less efficient producers of insurance regulation and appear to allow states that choose to expend the greatest resources to regulate for them. In addition, states with more profitable domestic insurers are shown to export greater levels of regulation, suggesting extraterritorial regulation may erect modest barriers to entry. We find evidence of increasing economies of scale in the production of insurance regulation after controlling for these regulatory externalities.     

Uncertainty and Export Performance: Evidence from 18 Countries

We study a sample of nine developed and nine developing countries to evaluate the questions of how foreign income uncertainty and real exchange rate (RER) uncertainty impact international trade and how those impacts vary according to stage of development. RER uncertainty has a negative and significant impact on export growth for six of the nine less developed countries in our sample, while it has an insignificant effect for a majority of the developed countries. In both groups, foreign income uncertainty has a more pervasively significant (and frequently larger) influence on trade than does RER uncertainty.