BACKGROUND Minimising prescription costs while maintaining quality is a core element of delivering high-value healthcare. There are various strategies to achieve savings, but almost no research to date on determining the most effective approach. We describe a new method of identifying potential savings due to large national variations in drug cost, including variation in generic drug cost, and ...

We examine how self-regulatory motivations of locomotion (initiation) and assessment (evaluation) are related to retirement wealth in middle-aged and older Americans. We test a hypothesis that high locomotion and some assessment levels predict high wealth levels. We use two national data sets: the 2008 Health and Retirement Study (N = 6,464) and the 2005 Midlife in the United States (N = 4,963)...

The 'quiet life hypothesis (QLH)' posits that banks enjoy the advantages of market power in terms of foregone revenues or cost savings. We suggest a uni ed approach to measure competition and e ciency simultaneously to test this hypothesis. We estimate bank-speci c Lerner indices as measures of competition and test if cost and pro t e ciency are negatively related to market power in the case of...

Aging populations are leading countries worldwide to social security reforms. Many countries are moving from pay-as-you-go to personal retirement account (PRA) systems because of their financial sustainability and positive impact on private savings. PRA systems boost private savings at a macro level by converting a government liability into financial wealth managed by private fund managers. How...

Semiconductor fabs are large, complex industrial sites with costs for a single facility approaching $10B. In this paper we discuss the possibility of putting the entire functionality of such a fab onto a single silicon chip. We demonstrate a path forward where, for certain applications, especially at the nanometer scale, one can consider using a single chip approach for building devices with si...

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This paper investigates empirically why Japan’s household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but liquidity-constrained households consume all of their disposable income. We found that the proportion of liquidity-co...

This paper develops a two-sector growth model in which institutional investors play a significant role. A necessary and suffi cient condition is established under which these investors own the entire capital stock in the long run. The dependence of the long-run growth rate on the behaviour of such investors, and the effects of a productivity increase are analysed. JEL classification. O41, O43 A...

Background: Rapidly increasing residential electricity demand has made raising energy efficiency an important policy issue in controlling electricity demand. Methods: This study uses a stochastic frontier model to estimate the residential electricity demand function and analyse electricity energy efficiency levels and their determinants using regional data on Japan. Results: The results confirm...