recognizing the advantages of primary care as a means of improving the entire health system, this text comments on reforms of publicly funded primary health centers, and the rapid development of private forprofit providers in sweden. many goals and expectations are connected to such reforms, which equally require critical analyses of scarce resources, professional trust/motivation and business ...

We examine the extent to which financial market development impacts the diffusion of 16 major technologies, looking across 55 countries, from 1870 to 2000. We find that greater depth in financial markets leads to faster technology diffusion for more capital-intensive technologies, but only in periods closer to the invention of the technology. In fact, we find no differential effect of financial...

In a market with short term investors, when noise is persistent, a liquidity shock affecting the aggregate demand at a given period propagates to future periods’ aggregate demands. As a consequence, asset prices reflect investors’ higher order expectations about both the fundamentals and the noise stock, worsening the “rational confusion” problem investors face when extracting information from ...

Trading under limited pre-trade transparency becomes increasingly popular on financial markets. We provide first evidence on traders’ use of (completely) hidden orders which might be placed even inside of the (displayed) bid-ask spread. Employing TotalView-ITCH data on order messages at NASDAQ, we propose a simple method to conduct statistical inference on the location of hidden depth and to te...

Over the past 5 years, Hungary has experienced one of the most remarkable market successes in a key energy-efficiency technology: compact fluorescent lighting. While market shares of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) were negligible half a decade ago, today residential CFL market penetration exceeds that in many industrialised economies, ranking Hungary among the eight countries in Europe with t...

This paper examines whether the different types of block shareholdings will have a different impact on the extent of Web voluntary disclosure during the differential privatization stages. Prior literature suggests that block ownership may have a substitutive or complementary monitoring effect on corporate disclosure. However, for economies transferring from state endowment to being privately he...

Insider trading studies related to the German market have emphasized that outside investors may earn excess returns by mimicking the transactions of corporate directors. Such a result, provided that it holds, would constitute a serious violation of the efficient market hypothesis. The results presented in this paper, though, show that this anomaly is mainly caused by a subset of stocks with hig...

We use recent farm household survey data from 5 Central European countries to explore the extent to which ill-functioning land and credit markets may present an obstacle to rural development. The first finding is that improved access to credit can, indeed, make a contribution to a more dynamic rural sector. A considerable share of rural households express their desire to expand agricultural cul...

The main purpose of this paper is to determine the applicability of the constitutional social rights in the so-called horizontal relations, i.e. the relations between private entities. Nowadays the constitutional rights are more and more often violated by private entities and not only by the state. The private entities interfere with the privacy of individuals, limit their freedom of expression...