This paper applies the five standard economic performance criteria to gauge the contribu-tion of Managed Care (MC) to the performance of three healthcare systems, viz. Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The criteria are (1) matching of consumer preferences, (2) technical efficiency, (3) adaptive capacity, (4) dynamic efficiency, and (5) a rent-free distribution of income that provides incentives for producers to attain criteria (1) through (4). Being insurance-based, the German, Dutch, and Swiss healthcare systems comprise three contractual relationships that can be judged in the light of these criteria. The maximum contribution of MC to the performance of the healthcare system is found for the Netherlands followed by Switzerland. The Independent Practice Associations rep-resenting MC in the Netherlands, and the Health Maintenance Organizations representing MC in Switzerland score 15 respectively 6 out of 30 points. By way of contrast, the con-tribution of the Disease Management Programs to the performance of the German health-care system remains limited (3 out of 30 points).
This article calls attention to a difficulty with insurers' investment policies that seems to have been overlooked so far. There is the distinct possibility that insurers cannot satisfy the demands of different stakeholders in terms of expected returns and volatility. While using the capital asset pricing model as the benchmark, this article distinguishes two groups of stakeholders that impose additional constraints. One is “income security” in the interest of current beneficiaries and older workers; the other is “predictability of contributions” in the interest of contributing younger workers and sponsoring employers. It defines the conditions for which the combination of these constraints results in a lack of feasibility of investment policy. Minimum deviation from the capital market line is proposed as the performance benchmark in these situations.
In response to population aging, pay-as-you-go pensions are being reduced in almost all developed countries. In many countries, governments aim to fill the resulting gap with subsidized private pensions. This paper exploits the recent German pension reform to shed new light on the uptake of voluntary, but heavily subsidized private pension schemes. Specifically, we investigate how the uptake of the recently
introduced “Riester pensions” depends on state-provided saving incentives, and how well the targeting to families and low-income households works in practice.
We show that, after a slow start, private pension plans took off very quickly. While saving incentives were effective in reaching parents, they were less successful in attracting low-income earners, although Riester pensions exhibit a more equal pattern by income than occupational pensions and unsubsidized private pension plans.
We also provide circumstantial evidence on displacement effects between saving for old-age provision and other purposes. Households who plan to purchase housing are less likely to have a Riester pension. The same holds for households who attach high importance to a bequest motive. Occupational pensions and other forms of private pensions, however, act as complements rather than as substitutes.
Important empirical information on household behavior and household finances, used heavily by researchers, central banks, and for policy consulting, is obtained from surveys. However, various interdependent factors that can only be controlled to a limited extent lead to unit and item nonresponse, and missing data on certain items is a frequent source of difficulties in statistical practice. All the more, it is important to explore techniques for the imputation of large survey data. This paper presents the theoretical underpinnings of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo multiple imputation procedure and outlines important technical aspects of the application of MCMC-type algorithms to large socio-economic datasets. In an exemplary application it is found that MCMC algorithms
have good convergence properties even on large datasets with complex patterns of missingness, and that the use of a rich set of covariates in the imputation models has a
substantial effect on the distributions of key financial variables.
Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism. An economic analysis of terrorism also points to alternative and potentially superior policies. We suggest three policies that can well be integrated into existing constitutions of democratic and rule-based countries. Two policies are based on diminishing the benefits of committing terrorist acts for prospective terrorists. This can be done by decentralising various parts of society or by diverting attention from terrorists, once a terrorist act has been committed. A third policy is to raise the
relative costs of terrorism by lowering the costs of non-violent means for pursuing political goals.
People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we find that people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being. Additional empirical analyses do not find institutional explanations of the empirical results that commuters systematically incur losses. We discuss several possibilities of an extended model of human behavior able to explain this ‘commuting paradox’.
The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behavior, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyze an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organism's fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behavior, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting in which the social information itself is endogenous to the experimental group, as it is in natural settings. We develop statistical models for distinguishing among different strategic uses of social information. The experimental data strongly suggest most participants employ a hierarchical strategy that uses both average observed
payoffs of options as well as frequency information, the same model predicted by our evolutionary analysis to dominate a wide range of conditions.
