This paper presents the results of a ten-country comparative study of health care financing systems and their progressivity characteristics. It distinguishes between the tax-financed systems of Denmark, Portugal and the U.K., the social insurance systems of France, the Netherlands and Spain, and the predominantly private systems of Switzerland and the U.S. It concludes that tax-financed systems...

This paper examines the occurrence of regressive voice assimilation in Swedish. Six speakers of Central Standard Swedish were recorded and the voicing conditions in stop-fricative and stop-stop clusters were analyzed. The findings indicate that regressive devoicing of lenis stops (/b d g/) occurs only when followed by /t/, but not /s/. This contradicts claims in the literature regarding the nat...

The traditional view that excise taxes are regressive has been challenged. I document the history of the term regressive tax, show that traditional definitions have always found cigarette taxes to be regressive, and illustrate the implications of the greater price responsiveness observed among the poor. I explain the different definitions of tax burden: accounting, welfare-based willingness to ...

In Lombardi (1996) I propose a set of constraints within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) that account for patterns of obstruent devoicing and assimilation phenomena in the world's languages. Rerankings of these constraints produce only patterns in which voicing assimilation is regressive. However, there are cases of progressive voicing assimilation. I will argue in this paper that...

Autism is a heterogeneous disorder with multiple behavioral and biological phenotypes. Accelerated brain growth during early childhood is a well-established biological feature of autism. Onset pattern, i.e., early onset or regressive, is an intensely studied behavioral phenotype of autism. There is currently little known, however, about whether, or how, onset status maps onto the abnormal brain...

In the Kalman filter, the state dynamics is specified by the state equation while the measurement equation characterizes the likelihood. In this paper, we propose a generalized methodology of specifying state dynamics using the conditional density of the states given its neighbors without explicitly defining the state equation. In other words, the typically strict linear constraint on the state...