Who Receives Medicaid in Old Age? Rules and Reality

Medicaid is a government programme that also provides health insurance to the elderly who have few assets and either low income or catastrophic health care expenses. We ask how the Medicaid rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency, and we ask what other observable characteristics are important to determine who ends up on Medicaid. The data show that both singles and couples with high retirement income can end up on Medicaid at very advanced ages. We find that, conditioning on a large number of observable characteristics, including those that directly relate to Medicaid eligibility criteria, single women are more likely to end up on Medicaid – so are non‐white people, but, surprisingly, their higher recipiency is concentrated in the higher income percentiles. We also find that people with low incomes who have a high‐school diploma or higher degree are much less likely to end up receiving Medicaid than their less‐educated counterparts. All of these effects are large and depend on retirement income in a very non‐linear way.     

Credit spreads: An empirical analysis on the informational content of stocks,bonds, and CDS

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between stock market implied credit spreads, CDS spreads, and bond spreads. A general VECM representation is proposed for changes in the three credit spread measures which accounts for zero, one, or two independent cointegration equations, depending on the evidence provided by any particular company. Empirical analysis on price discovery, based on a proprietary sample of North American and European firms, and tailored to the specific VECM at hand, indicates that stocks lead CDS and bonds more frequently than the other way round. It likewise confirms the leading role of CDS with respect to bonds.     

Measuring price discovery: The variance ratio, the R, and the weighted price contribution

We analyze the statistical properties of three price discovery measures: The variance ratio, the weighted price contribution (WPC), and the R² of unbiasedness regressions. We find that, if the price process is a driftless martingale, only the WPC is an unbiased estimator for the return variance explained during a time interval. For autocorrelated processes with a drift, only the R² of the unbiasedness regression is consistent, but it is biased for small samples.     

ARE COOPERATIVES MORE PRODUCTIVE THAN INVESTOR‐OWNED FIRMS? CROSS‐INDUSTRY EVIDENCE FROM PORTUGAL

We analyse empirically whether cooperatives and investor‐owned firms differ in terms of productive efficiency. Using rich Portuguese panel data covering a wide range of industries, we apply two different empirical approaches to estimate potential differences in productive efficiency. The results from our benchmark random‐effects model show that cooperatives are significantly less productive, on average, than investor‐owned firms, both at the aggregate level and for most of the industries considered. However, the results derived from a System‐GMM approach, which is our preferred empirical strategy, are much less conclusive, and we cannot conclude that cooperatives are generally less efficient that investor‐owned firms. With either approach, though, we find no evidence that cooperatives are more productive than investor‐owned firms in any industry.     

Accounting for distress in bank mergers

Most bank merger studies do not control for hidden bailouts, which may lead to biased results. In this study we employ a unique data set of approximately 1000 mergers to analyze the determinants of bank mergers. We use undisclosed information on banks’ regulatory intervention history to distinguish between distressed and non-distressed mergers. Among merging banks, we find that improving financial profiles lower the likelihood of distressed mergers more than the likelihood of non-distressed mergers. The likelihood to acquire a bank is also reduced but less than the probability to be acquired. Both distressed and non-distressed mergers have worse CAMEL profiles than non-merging banks. Hence, non-distressed mergers may be motivated by the desire to forestall serious future financial distress and prevent regulatory intervention.     

企业研发决策、政府资助方案及最优资助配比

本文对企业和政府在企业研发决策中研发组织方式进行了理论分析,研究了不同市场和不同决策下的政府的资助方案及最优资助配比。研究发现,在独立研发的情况下,封闭市场需要政府资助诱导企业私人研发的投入,且最优配比为1:2;出口导向型市场政府资助对企业私人研发的投入无诱导作用;进口导向型市场企业无需政府资助亦会进行私人研发投入。在产学研合作的情况下,封闭市场中支付学研机构的研发费用率k和政府资助s满足(1+s)(1-k)=1.5时达最优资助配比。     

Good timing: The economics of optimal stopping

This paper presents an economic interpretation of the optimal “stopping” of perpetual project opportunities under both certainty and uncertainty. Prior to stopping, the expected rate of return from delay exceeds the rate of interest. The expected rate of return from delay is the sum of the expected rate of change in project value and the expected rate of change in the option premium associated with waiting. At stopping the expected rate of return from delay has fallen to the rate of interest. Viewing stopping in this way unifies the theoretical and practical insights of the theory of stopping under certainty and uncertainty.     

Community and class antagonism

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the idea of redistributive tension, or class antagonism, in terms of the costs that poorer individuals would be willing to impose on the rich, to achieve a given gain in personal income. Our conclusion is that the nominal distribution of income could give a misleading picture of tensions in society, both within and across communities. Ideologies of community solidarity may well trump those of class solidarity because of the implicit sharing of community resources brought about by community-specific public goods. Greater economic mobility of particular types may actually exacerbate class tensions instead of attenuating them. We illustrate our theoretical results with a discussion of a number of historical episodes of shifting class tensions and alliances.