infonet-economy

We propose four different GMM estimators that allow almost consistent estimation of the structural parameters of panel probit models with fixed effects for the case of small T and large N. The moments used are derived for each period from a first order approximation of the mean of the dependent variable conditional on explanatory variables and on the fixed effect. The estimators...

From the mid-1990s citizens in Belgium, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland have a guaranteed periodic choice among risk-bearing sickness funds, who are responsible for purchasing their care or providing them with medical care. The rationale of this arrangement is to stimulate the sickness funds to improve efficiency in health care production and to respond to consumers...

This paper develops a two-sector general-equilibrium model in which firms in the primary economy have to create workplaces prior to production and product market competition. For this, we introduce the endogenous sunk-cost approach with two-stage decisions of firms from IO in the macro labor literature. By hypothesizing that technological change has lowered marginal costs but has...

We present a new approach to endogenizing technological spillovers. Firms choose levels of a cost-reducing innovation from a continuum before they engage in competition for each other's R&D-employees. Successful bids for the competitor's employee then result in higher levels of cost reduction. Finally, firms enter product market competition. We apply the approach to the...

The efficiency of hospitals is of interest to health insurers, government authorities and hospital management itself. However, econometric methods for determining (in)efficiency have severe drawbacks since hospitals are multiproduct firms and because the duality between production and cost functions cannot be assumed. In this work, non-parametric, deterministic data envelopment...

Filmstars gelten für den Erfolg eines Kinofilms als wesentliche Ingredienz und verdienen zum Teil astronomische Gehälter. In diesem Beitrag wird die Funktion des Filmstars als "Wegweiser" auf einem Markt untersucht, der durch substanzielle Qualitätsunsicherheit charakterisiert ist. Filmstars überbrücken auf verschiedene Weise Informationsungleichgewichte zum Konsumenten....