This paper examines how changes in major elements of the U.S. federal crop insurance program affect the structure of the agricultural insurance industry. We model interactions between farmers, insurance agents and insurance companies. Marginal changes in government policy (premium subsidy rate, A&O subsidy rate, and loading factor) affect the insurance premium rate, agent compensation rates, ag...

— Across sub-Saharan Africa agricultural subsidy programs have again become a common strategy for combatting rural poverty, increasing agricultural production, and reducing food insecurity. Despite a large literature examining subsidies’ effects on output and welfare, little is known about their political effects. This paper examines Malawi’s Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme, one of the lar...

BACKGROUND Physical inactivity is a major risk factor for many chronic diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and some cancers. It is estimated that, in Australia, physical inactivity contributes to 13,500 annual deaths and incurs an annual cost of AU$ 21 billion to the health care system. The cost of physical inactivity to the Western Australian (WA) economy is estimated to be ab...

Abstract: On December 2010, the government of Iran ended the decades-long subsidy program for bread and energy products and launched the Targeted Subsidy Reform program that considerably raised prices of food products. The objective of the study was to measure welfare impacts of food price changes on Iranian urban households between two survey data of 2009/10 and 2011/12 which were taken from I...

This paper shows how in Medicare Part D insurers' gaming of the subsidy paid to low-income enrollees distorts premiums and raises the program cost. Using plan-level data from the first five years of the program, I find multiple instances of pricing strategy distortions for the largest insurers. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that the changes in a concentration index measuring the mani...

The purpose of this study is to examine how public money transfers affect private money transfers. Analyses draw on a natural experiment in Taiwan, where two subsidy programs for the elderly were implemented in 1994-1995. One program targeted farmers age 65 years and older throughout Taiwan. The other subsidy program was tied to political elections and implemented in 5 of the survey hsiens (cou...

OBJECTIVE We examined sociodemographic trends in emergency department ED visits and postvisit health care for anxiety and stress disorders. METHODS Emergency department visits (N = 11,289) by children younger than 18 years were extracted from population-based administrative databases from Alberta, Canada (2002-2011). We examined health services use by demographics and socioeconomic proxy (Fir...

When the government subsidizes a commodity, it normally intends to promote production and/or consumption of that commodity for either political, environmental, or economic reasons. Today one major subsidy is the ethanol program, currently with a $0.51 per gallon subsidy, which will in the near future amount to a bill of over $3 billion annually on 6 billion gallons of production. This paper inv...

In recent years, research examining determinants and consequences of the means-tested child care subsidy program (the Child Care and Development Fund [CCDF]) has grown dramatically. To measure subsidy utilization, existing studies typically rely on parent-reported measures of subsidy receipt drawn from large surveys. As the research literature on child care subsidies has grown, however, so have...