BACKGROUND There is ample evidence in Asia and Latin America showing that past economic crises resulted in cuts in expenditures on health, lower utilization of health services, and deterioration of child and maternal nutrition and health outcomes. Evidence on the impact of past economic crises on health sector in Africa is lacking. The objectives of this article are to present the findings of a...

The literature on rare disasters shows that low probability events can explain high, time-varying risk premia. I find that large spikes in risk premia occur around financial crises but not around other disasters such as wars. A model with financial intermediaries generates endogenous financial crises that quantitatively match those in the data, while also replicating high equity risk premia and...

The general status of the health care (HC) system in the Czech Republic has been determined by a quite radical and rapid reform process that started in the early 90s. It was shaped by the relatively high capacities of the old Czech HC system and a widely shared willingness to increase HC resources in the first year of the reform. The reform itself has introduced a new system of public health in...

Two observations suggest that financial globalization played an important role in the recent financial crisis. First, more than half of the rise in net borrowing of the U.S. nonfinancial sectors since the mid 1980s has been financed by foreign lending. Second, the collapse of the U.S. housing and mortgage-backed-securities markets had worldwide effects on financial institutions and asset market...

Countries around the world have fallen into one of the deepest recessions since the Great Depression—a recession exacerbated by a severe financial crisis. Among the challenges that face monetary policymakers in such uncertain times is the danger economies worldwide, including the United States, Japan, and the euro area, may enter a period of deflation, in which the prices of goods and services ...

The Mckinnon-Shaw Hypothesis, in its’ various forms, is now thirty years old. Over that period literally hundreds of empirical studies have been completed examining the hypothesis in many different contexts. Initially, the hypothesis focused on the effects of so-called “Financial Repression” (low or negative real interest rates) on savings and investment levels in developing countries. In more ...