Policy makers in several industrial countries are seeking to limit the rise in health care cost growth by supporting coordinated or integrated care programs, which differ from most prevailing forms of medical organization in how physicians are paid and how they work in groups. However, as long as fee-for-service payment systems remain an option, general practitioners will be reluctant to embrace coordinated care because it would give them less autonomy in how they practice. A study in Switzerland indicates that general practitioners will require a pay increase of up to 40 percent before they are willing to accept coordinated care, and a similar study found that Swiss consumers wanted a substantial reduction in premiums to accept it. These findings suggest that provisions of US health care reform designed to encourage the growth of coordinated care—such as accountable care organizations and medical homes—may face a challenging future.
The paper introduces a simple framework for analyzing the environmental effects of local transportation policies, and it reviews some evidence. In several cases, subsidies for local public transportation have led to substantial reductions in road transportation and have thereby reduced externalities. Some but not all estimates suggest positive overall welfare effects of such policies. In the rare cases where road pricing has been applied, it has helped to reduce automobile transportation, and it has led to environmental improvements. The experience with specific driving restrictions like “days without cars” and “low emission zones” has been mixed. Local transportation policy can have a useful role to play as a complement to national policy instruments, but neither efficiency nor effectiveness can be taken for granted.
Workplace accidents are an important economic phenomenon. Yet, the pro-cyclical fluctuations in workplace accidents are not well understood. They could be related to fluctuations in effort and working hours, but workplace accidents may also be affected by reporting behavior. Our paper uses unique data on workplace accidents from an Austrian matched worker-firm dataset to study in detail how economic incentives affect workplace accidents. We find that workers who reported an accident in a particular period of time are more likely to be fired later on. And, we find support for the idea that recessions influence the reporting of moderate workplace accidents: if workers think the probability of dismissals at the firm level is high, they are less likely to report a moderate workplace accident.
We investigate the impact of EMU on macroeconomic volatility. The volatilities of inflation
and nominal interest rates have declined, as has, more importantly, the volatility of real
consumption growth. Since global volatility has fallen for reasons unrelated to EMU (the
great moderation), we focus on the volatilities of bilateral differences in growth rates (or
changes). Pairs of EMU countries have experienced the greatest fall in consumption volatility,
followed by pairs in which one country is an EMU member. We demonstrate that these
findings are closely linked to changes in consumption risk sharing. Overall, EMU has made a
difference.
This paper seeks to empirically identify what factors make it more or less likely for people to survive in a life-threatening situation. Three factors relate to individual attributes of the persons onboard: physical strength, economic resources, and nationality. Two relate to social aspects: social support and social norms. The Titanic disaster is a life-or-death situation. Otherwise-disregarded aspects of human nature become apparent in such a dangerous situation. The empirical analysis supports the notion that social norms are a key determinant in extreme situations of life or death.
There is a longstanding idea that happiness causes people to live longer, healthier lives. However, convincing evidence that subjective well-being (the more scholarly term for happiness) contributes to longevity and health has not been available. Recently, however, social psychologists Diener and Chan (1) showed that many kinds of studies, using different methods, conclude that happiness has a positive causal effect on longevity and physiological health.
We propose a direct measure of altruism between parents and adult children, using survey data on happiness from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000–2004. The question of altruism within families has policy relevance, for example, to understand whether public transfers crowd out private ones. Previous empirical evidence, based on observed transfer behavior, has failed to establish a clear consensus. Using various cross section, panel data, and instrumental variable estimators, we find a robust association between the happiness of parents and that of their adult children. A 1 standard deviation increase in a child’s happiness is associated with the same increase in own happiness as that of a 20–45% increase in household income, depending on specification.
