Payment incentives have significant consequences for the equity and efficiency of a health care system, and have recently come to the fore in health policy reforms. This paper first discusses the economic rationale for apparent international convergence toward payment systems with mixed demand and supplyside cost sharing. We then summarize the recent payment reforms undertaken in Taiwan, Korea ...

Our study of 267 U.S. firms shows that improved environmental risk management is associated with a lower cost of capital. Our findings provide an alternative perspective on the environmentaleconomic performance relationship, which has been dominated by the view that improvements in economic performance stem from better resource utilization. Firms also benefit from improved environmental risk ma...

All societies face the need to make judgments about what interventions (both public health and personal medical) to provide to their populations under reasonable resource constraints. Their decisions should be informed by good evidence and arguments from health technology assessment (HTA). But if HTA restricts itself to evaluations of safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness, it risks being vie...

State education officials have implemented performance standards, but state education aid has not kept up. By focusing on the relationship between spending and property wealth, most existing aid formulas only partially account for cost differences across districts and, thus, fail to fully promote equity in school performance. This paper shows how to estimate comprehensive educational cost index...

BACKGROUND Macroeconomic growth in China enables significant progress in health care and public health. It faces difficult choices regarding access, quality and affordability, while dealing with the increasing burden of chronic diseases. Policymakers are pressured to make complex decisions while implementing health strategies. This study shows how this process could be structured and reports th...

Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NBFIs) are increasingly being recognized as complementary to the banking system and perform a diversified range of functions through offering various financial services to individual, corporate and institutional clients. Nevertheless, the cost of funds of NBFIs is significantly higher than the banks as banks are the prime sources of funds for them. On the other ...

Beta as a measure of risk has been under fire for many years. Although practitioners still widely use the CAPM to estimate the cost of equity of companies, they are aware of its problems and are looking for alternatives. A possible alternative is to estimate the cost of equity based on the semideviation. a well-known and intuitively plausible measure of downside risk. Complementing evidence rep...

OBJECTIVE To determine the attitudes of physicians and trainees in regard to the roles of both cost-effectiveness and equity in clinical decision making. DESIGN In this cross-sectional study, electronic surveys containing a hypothetical decision-making scenario were sent to medical professionals to select between two colon cancer screening tests for a population. SETTING Three Greater Bosto...

The paper studies the impact of an equity transaction tax (ETT) on financial and real variables in a DSGE model with two types of financial frictions: (1) financial intermediaries facing a leverage constraint; (2) noise shocks that lead to the emergence of nonfundamental equity trade. The ETT depresses the demand for equity and hence increases the cost of capital; this then affects firms’ inves...