The following is a summary of the accompanying paper, A High Price to Pay: IMF Governance, Management of Developing Country Financial Crises, and Health Impacts, to which readers are referred for full details and supporting argumentation. The paper also includes discussion of possible counter-arguments to democratic reform of the IMF, and the historical context of IMF governance, which are omit...

After six years' medical reform, about 7.8 billion person-times of medical service has been achieved by 2014, and the number of persons covered by basic medical insurance for urban employees, basic medical insurance for urban residents, and new rural cooperative medical insurance exceeded 1.3 billion, of which the coverage ratio reached as high as over 95%, establishing the largest basic medica...

In this paper, we present evidence that firms with concentrated ownership manage earnings when their large shareholders have an incentive to do so. The large shareholders of Chinese public firms often pledge their shares for loans. Before the split share reform in 2006, loan terms were based on the book value of the firm. Since then, the share price has become critical for share pledged loans. ...

Since its election to office in 1996, reform of Private Health Insurance (PHI) has been the most obvious health policy focus of the Howard Government. The reform process has focussed on price, product, promotion, legislation and regulation. It has resulted in one of the largest new Commonwealth health outlays in recent memory. Health insurance funds have emerged as active purchasers of care, no...

Although health insurance exchanges are a growing source of individual coverage, little is known about consumer behavior on these exchanges. While health insurance exchanges are intended to facilitate competition among insurers and make it easier for consumers to access insurance, understanding how consumers choose insurance plans is necessary for the design of these markets. We characterize de...

The paper analyzes the effect of incentives regulation, when the yardstick competition approach is supplemented with a performance tax on providers. In an application to prospective payments in health care in the U.S. and Japan, we show differential effects of value-based purchasing, when price-setting is related to benchmark values of quality measures or length-of-stay. The predictions of our ...