We examine the marginal effects of decentralized public health spending by incorporating estimates of behavioural responses to changes in health spending in benefit incidence analysis. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 207 Indonesian districts over the period from 2001 to 2004. We show that district public health spending is largely driven by central government transfers, with an elas...

The recent global financial problem urges government to play role in stimulating the economy due to the fact that private sector has little ability to purchase during the recession. A concerned question is whether the increased government spending crowds out private consumption and whether it helps stimulate the economy. If the government spending policy is effective; the private consumption is...

BACKGROUND One of the major challenges in estimating health care spending spent on each cause of illness is allocating spending for a health care event to a single cause of illness in the presence of comorbidities. Comorbidities, the secondary diagnoses, are common across many causes of illness and often correlate with worse health outcomes and more expensive health care. In this study, we prop...

Do states engage in infrastructure expenditure competition to attract new economic activity? Economic theory is inconclusive on the matter. States might respond to increased infrastructure spending in competitor states by increasing their own infrastructure spending. Conversely, states may decrease spending in the presence of positive spillovers from competitor states’ infrastructure investment...

 The introduction of the full-replacement HSA plan reduced total spending by 25 percent in the first year. Each category of health spending experienced statistically significant reductions in the first year of the HSA plan with the exception of spending on inpatient hospital stays. Spending on laboratory services and prescription drugs had the largest statistically significant declines (36 per...

Despite the presence of Medicare, out-of-pocket medical spending is a large expenditure risk facing the elderly. While women live longer than men, elderly women incur higher out-of-pocket medical spending than men at each age. In this paper, we examine whether differences in marital status and living arrangements can explain this difference. We find that out-of-pocket medical spending is approx...

CONTEXT It is unclear if advance directives (living wills) are associated with end-of-life expenditures and treatments. OBJECTIVE To examine regional variation in the associations between treatment-limiting advance directive use, end-of-life Medicare expenditures, and use of palliative and intensive treatments. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Prospectively collected survey data from the Healt...

In this study, we investigate the association between information technology (IT) spending and future firm performance. Critics contend that greater expenditures on IT rarely lead to superior financial results, citing studies that compare firm performance to current IT spending. But valuation and stock-return studies have found a positive association between the market value of firms and their ...

Background Competing claims are made about the amount of money that pharmaceutical companies spend on research and development (R&D) versus promotion. This study investigates this question in the Canadian context. Methods Two methods for determining industry-wide figures for spending on promotion were employed. First, total industry spending on detailing and journal advertising for 2013-2016 ...