The Distribution of Household Health Expenditures in Australia*

Out‐of‐pocket health expenditures in Australia are high in international comparisons and have been growing at a faster rate than most other health costs in recent years. This raises concerns about the extent to which out‐of‐pocket costs have constrained access to health services for low income households. Using data from the ABS Household Expenditure Survey 2003–2004, we model the relationships between health expenditure shares and equivalised total expenditure for categories of out‐of‐pocket health expenditures and analyse the extent of protection given by concession cards. To allow for flexibility in the relationship we adopt Yatchew's semi‐parametric estimation technique. This is the first detailed distributional analysis of household health expenditures in Australia. We find mixed evidence for the protection health concession cards give against high out‐of‐pocket health expenditures. Despite higher levels of subsidy, households with concession cards do not have lower out‐of‐pocket expenditures than non‐cardholder households except for the highest expenditure quintile. Cards provide most protection for GP out‐of‐pocket expenditures.     

A Mechanism for Inducing Cooperation in Noncooperative Environments: Theory and Applications

We construct a market‐based mechanism that induces players in a noncooperative game to make the same choices as characterize cooperation. We then argue that this mechanism is applicable to a wide range of economic questions and illustrate this claim using the problem of “The Tragedy of the Commons.”     

Higher Order Expectations in Asset Pricing

We examine formally Keynes' idea that higher order beliefs can drive a wedge between an asset price and its fundamental value based on expected future payoffs. We call this the higher order wedge, which depends on the difference between higher and first order expectations of future payoffs. We analyze the determinants of this wedge and its impact on the equilibrium price in the context of a dynamic noisy rational expectations model. We show that the wedge reduces asset price volatility and disconnects the price from the present value of future payoffs. The impact of the higher order wedge on the equilibrium price can be quantitatively large.     

Good‐Specific Habit Formation and the Cross‐Section of Expected Returns

I study asset prices in a general equilibrium framework in which agents form habits over individual varieties of goods rather than over an aggregate consumption bundle. Goods are produced by monopolistically competitive firms whose elasticities of demand depend on consumers' habit formation. Firms that produce goods with a high habit level relative to consumption have low demand elasticities, set high prices for their product, have low expected returns on their stock, and have low asset pricing betas and stock return volatilities. I find supportive evidence for these predictions in the data.