Background Restraint of psychiatric patients is an ethical issue, emphasized by awareness of the rights of mentally ill individuals. Restraint significantly influences the emotional welfare of the patient, is traumatic, deprives the individual of freedom and has aggressive connotations. Aims: To examine the influence of raising the awareness of the staff to reduce use of physical restraints. Hy...

We examine the welfare effects of regulation in a model where firms can shroud add-on costs, such as penalty fees for credit cards. In isolation, imposing price controls or disclosure mandates on such fees can increase or decrease welfare, even when these regulations have no direct costs. There are, however, strong complementarities between price controls and disclosure mandates: conditional on...

More Training? No doubt general practitioners and mental welfare officers will play their part in coping; the fact remains that only a minority of either have had special training in the subject and must depend on their increasing experience. Some of them, and their patients alike, may suffer from their lack of training. Can we, the N.A.M.H., do anything more here? Courses have long been run, b...

We consider a simple general equilibrium model with imperfect competition. Firms are price taker in the input market and compete à la Cournot in some or all of the product markets (their technology displays constant returns to scale). We show that an increase in the number of firms does not always improve welfare. We also provide a characterization in terms of mark-up rates of the sectors for w...

Effective implementation and enforcement of legislation is essential to ensure animal welfare. In the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) European Region the well-established body of national and European Union laws in existence is growing continuously. The growth is due to various factors, such as new technology in animal farming and experimentation, exploitation of wildlife, new unders...