 A rapidly growing public policy concern facing the United States is whether future generations of retired Americans, particularly those in the Baby Boomer and Gen X cohorts, will have adequate retirement incomes. There have been several policy studies in recent years that suggest that the decreasing relevance of defined benefit (DB) plans relative to defined contribution plans (such as 401(k)...

BACKGROUND Vaccination programs often organize subsidies and public relations in order to obtain high uptake rates and coverage. However, effects of subsidies and public relations have not been studied well in the literature. In this study, the demand function of pneumococcal vaccination among the elderly in Japan is estimated, incorporating effects of public relations and subsidy. METHODS Us...

The paper studies the effects of cross-country differences in human capital formation on income distributions. Our overlapping generations economy has the following features: (1) consumers are heterogenous with respect to ability and parental human capital; (2) intergenerational transfers take place via parental education and, public investments in education Þnanced by taxes (possibly, with a l...

abstract the objective of this study is evaluation of government’s optimum combination of policy instruments on per capita consumption of bread and the share of this product in food cost of families in different income classes. the minimization of changes in dead weight loss function is used in this study. by using boot strop method and on base of normal distribution for supply elasticity and d...

In this study, we use the Health and Retirement Study to test whether older adult smokers, defined as those 50 years and older, respond to cigarette tax increases. Our preferred specifications show that older adult smokers respond modestly to tax increases: a $1.00 (131.6%) tax increase leads to a 3.8-5.2% reduction in cigarettes smoked per day (implied tax elasticity = -0.03 to -0.04). We iden...

We develop a model of education where individuals face educational risk. Successful graduation depends on individual effort to study and public resources. After realization of risk, they either work as skilled or as unskilled worker. We show that an optimal public policy consists of tuition fees combined with skill-contingent loans, lump-sum transfers/taxes, and public funding of the educationa...

Background and Objectives: Pharmaceutical expenditures are responsible for a major part of health systems’ cost. According to the WHO’s statistics, Iran is the first among the 20 countries in the world in terms of drug consumption. The first step in controlling consumption of a particular good is to identify factor inducing the relevant demands. Hence, this study aimed to identify the pattern a...