This paper examines hospital responses to changes in diagnosis-specific prices by exploiting a 1988 policy reform that generated large price changes for 43 percent of Medicare admissions. I find hospitals responded primarily by "upcoding" patients to diagnosis codes with the largest price increases. This response was particularly strong among for-profit hospitals. I find little evidence hospita...

Consumers' price responsiveness is central to US health-care reform proposals, but the best available estimates are now more than 25 years old. We estimate health-care demands by calculating expected end-of-year prices and incorporating them into a zero-inflated ordered probit model applied to several overlapping panels of data from 1996 to 2003. Results from our correlated random effects speci...

In a two-period model with uncertainty about life expectancy, we analyze several measures which are typically included in a social security reform: tax incentives for private life annuities, a cut in the social security benefits and an increase in the social security tax. First, we look at the demand side and study the effects on old-age provision for a given annuity price. It is shown that tax...

This paper examines the equilibrium price effects of the privatization of housing assets that were previously owned and allocated by the state. I develop a theoretical framework that shows that privatization can have ambiguous effects on prices in the private market, and that the degree of misallocation of the assets prior to privatization determines the subsequent price effects. I test the pre...

The Chinese refined oil pricing reform in 2013 has brought its price to be more aligned with the international price, helping mitigate prior distorted mechanisms. Its impact on correlation, tail risks, and spillover effects between crude market sectoral stock markets warrants empirical assessments. Time-varying copula models conditional VaR (CoVaR) are employed examine correlation indexes befor...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper examines total factor productivity (TFP) growth, technical change and economies of scale measure of Korean fossil-fuel power generation companies (GENCOs) between 2001 and 2012. For the empirical investigation , we estimated the cost function along with specification tests in order to find the most appropriate empirical model. Empirical results show TFP deterior...

The stock market, take-over bidders, executive pay setters, perhaps Stephen Littlechild himself, even last summer’s weather, all seem to have been undermining RPI–X price-cap regulation. Until recently, price-cap regulation was regarded as demonstrably superior to US-style rate-of-return regulation, and regulatory reform in several countries has embraced price-cap regulation. But in Britain, wh...