BACKGROUND Governments use different approaches to ensure that private for-profit healthcare services meet certain quality standards. Such government guidance, referred to as public stewardship, encompasses government policies, regulatory mechanisms, and implementation strategies for ensuring accountability in the delivery of services. However, the effectiveness of these strategies in low- and ...

Monetary cutbacks have occurred in the healthcare industry with increasing incidence since the mid-1980s. Attempts at self-preservation through cost-constraint have been instituted by hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid, and private insurance companies. Curtailment of expenditures, as well as reestablishing profit, has taken many forms. These include managed care, mergers, changing profit status, ...

health insecurity has emerged as a major concern among health policy-makers particularly in low- and middle-income countries (lmics). it includes the inability to secure adequate healthcare today and the risk of being unable to do so in the future as well as impoverishing healthcare expenditure. the increasing health insecurity among 150 million of the world’s poor has moved social protection i...

Data mining models often carry the final objective of maximizing profit or minimizing cost. This problem becomes even more profound in financial applications that can have multiple constraints, such as interest rate, score cut-off, and the loan amount to allocate. In this paper, we present a pricing framework for discovering the total profit from a probabilistic model, given a benefit function.

This paper revisits the no-attachment assumption in job search models with random productivity fluctuations and Nash-bargaining. Both workers and firms value the option to remain in attachment: firms profit from a reduced hiring cost, while workers gain from a higher reservation wage when bargaining with a new employer. Ex-post differentiation of workers into attached and unattached unemployed ...

Although a comprehensive framework for most of the theoretical foundations of duality has been available to economists since the seminal work by Shephard in 1953, empirical applications of duality have become popular mainly during the last ten years. The first empirical study which I am aware of that exploited duality theory is the one by Nerlove in 1963 which estimated a CobbDouglas cost funct...

Profit Sharing and Training We analyze the impact of profit sharing on the share of workers receiving training. An effect is plausible because: 1) profit sharing is a credible commitment by firms to reward firmspecific skills acquired by formal or informal training, 2) profit sharing may reduce turnover and increase the returns to training, 3) a common payment for the whole workforce leads to p...

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of US Forest Service timber auctions. The model fits the data well both within the sample of unrestricted sales used for estimation, and when we predict (out-of-sample) outcomes for small business set-asides. Our estimates suggest that restricting entry sub...