The Payments System Board of the Reserve Bank has responsibility for, among other things, promoting stability, efficiency and competition in the payments system. In respect of retail payment systems, the Board’s work has focused on: establishing clearer price signals to cardholders; removing restrictions on merchants that limit their choices in accepting payment instruments; improving access to...

Evidence from studies in international relations, the politics of reform, collective action and price competition suggests that economic agents in social dilemma situations cooperate more to avoid losses than in the pursuit of gains. To test whether the prospect of losses can induce cooperation, we let experimental subjects play the traveler’s dilemma in the gain and loss domain. Subjects coope...

An empirical procedure was developed to analyze the cost effectiveness of alternative crop insurance products in terms of increasing producer net returns and minimizing variation in net returns. Results indicate that CAT was the overwhelmingly preferred MPCI option for all scenarios. The ranking of the other MPCI options was consistently 50/100, 60/100, and 75/100 in all scenarios. The CRC opti...

This paper describes the early experience of the Health Insurance Plan of California (the HIPC), a small-employer purchasing cooperative established in 1993. The plan's experience is consistent with the predictions of advocates of market-oriented health care reform: The program's design has encouraged cost-conscious choice by enrollees, which in turn has generated price competition among plans....

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side, it would facilitate the adoption of more incentive-compatible insurance contracts, for example throu...

This paper examines the competitiveness of winner-take-all price competition in homogeneous product oligopoly environments where underlying buyer demands and/or firms’ costs need not be continuous. Our analysis is motivated by the observation that a variety of economic settings have these features. For example, in 1996 an Ivy League university solicited bids from several vendors for its initiat...

Fifty years ago several thousand children were born with severe limb defects after their mothers had been given thalidomide in pregnancy. This tragedy caused procedures for licensing new medicines to become much stricter. Where, nevertheless, significant side effects were found it became common to sue for damages. These consequences have caused possibly an even greater disaster damaging many mo...

The Chinese economy underwent cyclical fluctuations in growth and inflation in the reform period. Contrasting views exist on the role of money in such fluctuations. This paper assesses these views employing structural VEC models based on the exchange equation. It is found that in the long run money accommodates, rather than causes, changes in output and prices. In the short run, price fluctuati...

Between 1996 and 2003, a series of amendments were made to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that gradually increased the tax deduction for health insurance purchases by the self-employed (SE) from 25 to 100 percent. We study how these changes have influenced the likelihood that a SE person has health insurance coverage as the policyholder. The Current Population Survey is used to construct a data set...

European cattle markets have recently undergone significant change. We explore the simultaneous impacts of agricultural policy reform and the occurrence of an animal health crisis on spatial interdependencies of calf prices of four major European Union markets. The markets are found to be integrated. Price shocks are rapidly absorbed. We find that the member state specific implementations of th...