ESTIMATING WELFARE IN INSURANCE MARKETS USING VARIATION IN PRICES

We provide a graphical illustration of how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to quantify the welfare loss associated with inefficient pricing in insurance markets with selection. We then show how this welfare loss can be estimated empirically using identifying variation in the price of insurance. Such variation, together with quantity data, allows us to estimate the demand for insurance. The same variation, together with cost data, allows us to estimate how insurer's costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price. The slope of this estimated cost curve provides a direct test for both the existence and nature of selection, and the combination of demand and cost curves can be used to estimate welfare. We illustrate our approach by applying it to data on employer-provided health insurance from one specific company. We detect adverse selection but estimate that the quantitative welfare implications associated with inefficient pricing in our particular application are small, in both absolute and relative terms.     

Socioeconomic Impacts of Public Forest Policies on Heterogeneous Agricultural Households

Nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme. In principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation. However, concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation, and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural Nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods. To study the effect of government policies on forest use, an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in Nepal was developed. The model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources, and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests. Socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income, employment and income inequality. The results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact, and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies. This study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment, and widen income inequalities within communities, compared to alternative policies. Certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households?? ability to meet survival needs. The findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry??s contribution to production are accounted for. The study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural Nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs.     

Career barriers: Do we need more research?

Research on career barriers has stressed the commonalities among women, and the ways in which women can develop the personal and professional skills they need to demonstrate their commitment to the organization. However, this individualistic focus is not appropriate for dealing with the problem of combining career and family responsibilities. Our research focus must now turn to the commonalities among organizations, and the ways in which different organizational structures and cultures are more or less responsive to women. A study of Canadian National Sport Organizations illustrates some of the issues in this approach.Dr. Dallas Cullen is a member of the Department of Organizational Analysis in the Faculty of Business at the University of Alberta, with a teaching specialization in gender issues in organizations. Some of her previous research focussed on the impact of affirmative action on women's labour force participation in Canada and the U.S.     

供应链会计

继2006年7月和8月FM登载的有关组织间成本管理问题的文章之后，John Cullen又提出了财务经理还能够在其他哪些领域提供物流支持[编者按]     

TRADE‐OFFS BETWEEN CIVIL LIBERTIES AND NATIONAL SECURITY: A DISCRETE CHOICE EXPERIMENT

We explore differences in perception of national security policies between self‐identified liberals, moderates, and conservatives from a national sample of U.S. adults. Using a discrete choice experiment, we also quantify each group's willingness to trade off select policies in exchange for reduced risk of a 9/11‐style terrorist attack. Relative to other groups, liberals are more likely to view such policies as ineffective and susceptible to government abuse. They also perceive a lower threat of terrorism. All groups are willing to make trade‐offs between civil liberties and risk of a terrorist attack. However, loss of civil liberties affects liberals more than conservatives. (JEL D61, H41, H56)     

Joint estimation of discount rates and willingness to pay for public goods

We analyze willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental programs whose time periods of benefit and repayment differ, using a net present value framework that identifies parameters of both WTP and personal discount rates. Respondents to a contingent valuation survey focusing on protection of critical habitat buffer zones for the endangered Steller Sea Lion in Alaska were asked their willingness to pay for 1-, 5-, and 15-year repayment periods. We jointly estimate the personal discount rates and WTP via maximum likelihood, and compare with a model assuming a fixed, market discount rate.