Education and health care are basic services essential in any effort to combat poverty and are often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that purpose. This paper examines the effectiveness of public social spending on education and health care in several African countries and finds that these programs favor not the poor, but those who are better-off. It concludes that this targeting pr...

How does access to formal microinsurance affect economic development? We report results from a large randomized natural field experiment conducted in southwestern China in the context of insurance for sows. We find that providing access to formal insurance significantly increases farmers’ tendency to raise sows. We argue that this finding also suggests that farmers are not previously efficientl...

Canada's provincial governments have, until relatively recently, provided virtually all seniors with generous prescription drug coverage. Managers of these programs have implemented a variety of policies to contain spending while ensuring access to necessary medicines. Some of these policies have been successful in temporarily slowing cost growth. However, the lack of comprehensive utilization ...

In the context of a standard equilibrium matching framework, this paper considers how a duration-dependent unemployment insurance (UI) system affects the dynamics of unemployment and wages in an economy subject to stochastic job-destruction shocks. It establishes that re-entitlement effects induced by a finite duration UI program generate intertemporal transfers from firms that hire in future b...

This paper examines the effectiveness of Taiwanese environmental health policies, whose aim is to improve environmental quality by reducing tire waste via the Tire Resource Recovery Program. The results confirm that implemented environmental health policies improve the overall health of the population (i.e. a decrease in death caused by bronchitis and other respiratory diseases). Current policy...

OBJECTIVES There is an urgent need to understand how to improve targeting of artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) to patients with confirmed malaria infection, including subsidised ACTs sold over-the-counter. We hypothesised that offering an antimalarial subsidy conditional on a positive malaria rapid diagnostic test (RDT) would increase uptake of testing and improve rational use of ACTs. ME...

A binomial logit model is fitted to the college attendance behavior of 27,046 male high-school juniors in 1960, divided into 20 subgroups defined by student ability and family income. Tuition, high admissions standards, travel costs, and room and board costs all have significant negative effects on attendance. The highest elasticities of demand are found to occur in the low-income strata and lo...

The U.S. federal government implements environmental, biofuels and crop insurance programs that influence land use. They are not well integrated in that cost savings from crop insurance subsidies are not acknowledged when screening land for retirement or when calculating the cost of land retirement programs. We identify and evaluate an optimal benefit index for enrollment in a land retirement p...

INTRODUCTION The incidence rate of a disease is an important parameter for epidemiological research, which elucidate the burden, risks and trends of the disease in a general population. A number of studies have made efforts to elucidate the etiology of non-traumatic osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH), such as the association with corticosteroid usage or alcohol abuse. However, regarding t...