Motor vehicles play a central role in the modern American lifestyle. The vast majority of workers travel to work by private vehicle. Motor vehicles are one of the most widely owned assets, with more than 85 percent of U.S. households owning one or more vehicles in 1992. Costs related to vehicles—vehicle purchases, operating expenses and repairs, and insurance—account for a sizable part of the t...

a Department of Health Systems Financing, World Health Organization, 20 avenue Appia, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. Correspondence to Guy Carrin (e-mail:[email protected]). doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.046664 How health systems are financed largely determines whether people can obtain needed health care and whether they suffer financial hardship as a result of obtaining care. Both design and implementation...

Older adults have been shown to avoid negative and prefer positive information to a higher extent than younger adults. This positivity bias influences their information processing as well as decision-making. We investigate age-related positivity bias in charitable giving in two studies. In Study 1 we examine motivational factors in monetary donations, while Study 2 focuses on the emotional effe...

This paper follows up recent work on the relationship between (un–)employment and wage effects of social security financing undertaken by the OECD Jobs Study. Based on a simple macroeconometric model of the labour market, I investigate whether the peculiar OECD results for Germany on the incidence of social security contributions and taxes also hold up within a somewhat different model. The stu...

To study questions of taxation in the neo-classical growth model, we need to extend it to allow for government spending and taxation. Here we study the simplest possible model, where government spending is an exogenous stochastic process G(s). We assume that this spending is wasted (thrown into the ocean). It would be possible to amend the model to allow for example for the financing of public ...

This paper shows the macroeconomic and welfare implications of an aging population in the United States, using a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model with uninsurable idiosyncratic working ability shocks and mortality shocks. The model uses three population projections in Social Security Administration (2003), and generates economies as equilibrium transition paths from 1961 to 220...

The long-term success of payment for environmental services (PES) schemes depends on adequate demand for services and sustainable financing. We examine the viability of using locally financed payments to protect watershed services in rural eastern Costa Rica. Using dichotomous choice contingent valuation, we measure households’ willingness to pay higher water bills for a local PES programme to ...

This paper studies loan activity in a context where banks have to follow Basel Accord type rules and need to find financing with the households. Loan activity typically decreases when investment returns of entrepreneurs decline, and we study which type of policy could revigorate an economy in a trough. We find that active monetary policy increases loan volume even when the economy is in a good ...

OBJECTIVE To estimate how many child deaths might be prevented if user fees were removed in 20 African countries DESIGN Simulation model combining evidence on key health interventions' impacts on reducing child mortality with analysis of the effect of fee abolition on access to healthcare services. RESULTS Elimination of user fees could prevent approximately 233,000 (estimate range 153,000-...

The Food Stamp Program (FSP) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) are important parts of national public assistance policy, and there is considerable overlap in the populations that the programs serve. About half of all SSI recipients reside in FSP recipient households. This article uses Social Security administrative data and the Food Stamp Quality Control samples for federal fiscal years 20...