The rapid rise of predatory journals—publications taking large fees without providing robust editorial or publishing services—has created what some have called an age of academic racketeering. Predatory journals recruit articles through aggressive marketing and spam emails, promising quick review and open access publication for a price. There is little if any quality control and virtually no tr...

Modeling Income Dynamics for Public Policy Design: An Application to Income Contingent Student Loans This paper studies the importance of dynamic earnings modeling for the design of income contingent student loans (ICLs). ICLs have been shown to be theoretically optimal in terms of efficiency in the presence of risk aversion, adverse selection and moral hazard, and have attractive equity proper...

A common assumption is that access to care is more equitably distributed among income groups in countries that provide universal, publicly funded health insurance than in countries that do not. But does universal health coverage really eliminate disparities among income groups? Findings from The Commonwealth Fund 1998 International Health Policy Survey suggest that countries with universal cove...

We find direct evidence that institutions increase round-trip stock trades, increase average commissions per share, and pay unusually high commissions on some trades in order to send abnormally high commissions to the lead underwriters of profitable initial public offerings (IPOs). These excess commission payments are a particularly effective way for transient investors to receive lucrative IPO...

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated a) the amount and types of out-of-pocket expenditures by patients for nominally free services in a large public hospital in Bangladesh, b) the factors influencing these expenses, and c) the impact of these expenses on household income. METHODS: Eighty-one maternity patients were interviewed during their hospitalization in the Dhaka Medical College Hospital. Pa...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the price responsiveness of utilization of formal children's health-care services in Nepal and to use this information to model the impact on utilization of subsidies or increases in user fees. METHODS A total of 8112 individual observations (of children aged < 15 years) from 2847 households in 274 communities were obtained from the 1996 Nepal Living Standards Survey. A ...

Firms insure themselves from liquidity shocks by contracting on credit lines banks. I document novel empirical evidence how the risk of contract nonperformance banks is priced. pay a higher price for loan commitments safer A one standard deviation increase in cross-sectional mean bank capital increases commitment fees 5%. To investigate potential causal effect lender stability fees, exploit exo...