As multi-hospital kidney exchange clearinghouses have grown, the set of players has grown from patients and surgeons to include hospitals. Hospitals have the option of enrolling only their hard-to-match patient-donor pairs, while conducting easily arranged exchanges internally. This behavior has already started to be observed. We show that the cost of making it individually rational for hospita...

The paper presents an econometric accounting of the e¤ective corporate tax rate in Australia for the years 1993 to 1996. The estimation is a panel of Australian …rms that uses a specially gathered …nancial data base. Using …xed and random e¤ects, the model speci…es that the statutory tax rate is estimated as the constant term of the model. An ability to …nd an estimated statutory tax rate that ...

This paper explores how oil price shocks a ect scal policy and macroeconomic performance in an oil exporting small open economy. In this type of economy, oil price shocks in uence scal policy because they have nontrivial e ects on the government's budget constraint. On one hand, oil price shocks a ect revenue directly as oil revenue constitutes a large share of total revenue. On the other hand,...

Using a rich data set on government spending forecasts, we estimate the effects of unexpected government spending both when the nominal interest rate is near zero lower bound (ZLB) and outside of ZLB period in Japan. The output multiplier is 1.5 on impact in the ZLB period while it is 0.7 outside of the ZLB period. We argue that this result is not driven by the amount of slack in the economy. W...

Most economists and observers place the lack of fiscal discipline at the core of the recent Argentine crisis. This begs the question of how countries like Belgium or Italy (pre-Maastricht) could run large fiscal deficits and accumulate debts far beyond those of Argentina, without experiencing crises nearly as dramatic as that of Argentina? Why is it that Argentina cannot act like Belgium or Ita...

In this paper, I compare the welfare implications of implementing Bismarckian and Beveridgean social security systems. I …rst judge a social security system with universal bene…ts against one with earningsdependent bene…ts that provides the same level of bene…ts. Surprisingly, I …nd that agents can be better o¤ with the implementation of a system with universal bene…ts both in the short and in ...

British Journal of General Practice, January 2016 e62 INTRODUCTION Travel to altitudes above 2500 m is a popular recreational activity that presents a potential risk of high-altitude illness. Acute mountain sickness (AMS), for example, affects up to three-quarters of trekkers attempting to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, East Africa (5895 m). GPs should be able to provide practical advice ...

Following the 2008/9 financial crisis, China instituted a 4 trillion RMB stimulus package that was spent mostly on infrastructure, with a particular impact at local level. The goal was to sustain economic growth and preserve social stability. We use the Asian Barometer surveys from shortly before and after the stimulus to examine its impact on public trust in government, and find a reversal of ...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the municipal bond market with an emphasis on the numerous embedded contingent claims. Embedded contingent claims include the standard call features, sinking funds, the advance refunding option, the synthetic advance refunding option, the credit risk option (default risk), marketability, and the numerous tax-related events. Municipal bond i...

This paper investigates the past effectiveness of the Maastricht Treaty (MT) and Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) in disciplining fiscal policy in the Euro zone. We estimate fiscal reaction functions for a panel of 11 members of the Euro zone including the more recent period of the reformed SGP, and compare them with fiscal responses from other “industrialized” OECD countries. Our main finding i...