In the Spring 1995 issue of Health Affairs Mark Pauly and John Goodman outlined their proposal for medical savings accounts (MSAs) supplemented with tax credits to purchase insurance and encourage cost-effective consumer behavior. This proposal has been widely debuted, both in Washington and across the nation. To further enlighten the debate, Health Affairs presents two accounts of the experien...

We examine how self-regulatory motivations of locomotion (initiation) and assessment (evaluation) are related to retirement wealth in middle-aged and older Americans. We test a hypothesis that high locomotion and some assessment levels predict high wealth levels. We use two national data sets: the 2008 Health and Retirement Study (N = 6,464) and the 2005 Midlife in the United States (N = 4,963)...

The 'quiet life hypothesis (QLH)' posits that banks enjoy the advantages of market power in terms of foregone revenues or cost savings. We suggest a uni ed approach to measure competition and e ciency simultaneously to test this hypothesis. We estimate bank-speci c Lerner indices as measures of competition and test if cost and pro t e ciency are negatively related to market power in the case of...

Aging populations are leading countries worldwide to social security reforms. Many countries are moving from pay-as-you-go to personal retirement account (PRA) systems because of their financial sustainability and positive impact on private savings. PRA systems boost private savings at a macro level by converting a government liability into financial wealth managed by private fund managers. How...

Semiconductor fabs are large, complex industrial sites with costs for a single facility approaching $10B. In this paper we discuss the possibility of putting the entire functionality of such a fab onto a single silicon chip. We demonstrate a path forward where, for certain applications, especially at the nanometer scale, one can consider using a single chip approach for building devices with si...

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This paper investigates empirically why Japan’s household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but liquidity-constrained households consume all of their disposable income. We found that the proportion of liquidity-co...