the world health organization’s (who’s) world health report 2010, “health systems financing, the path to universal coverage,” promoted universal health coverage (uhc) as an aspirational objective for country health systems. yet, in addition to the dimensions of services and coverage, distribution of coverage in the population, and financial risk protection highlighted by the report, the conside...

in today’s competitive transportation systems, passengers search to find traveling agencies that are able to serve them efficiently considering both traveling time and transportation costs. in this paper, we present a new model for the traveling salesman problem with multiple transporters (tspmt). in the proposed model, which is more applicable than the traditional versions, each city has diffe...

Abstract_______________________________________________________________________ The literature concerning the U.S. federal deficit and its implications for the federal government's intertemporal budget constraint seems to have reached a tentative conclusion that starting with the Reagan administration the U.S. federal government has violated its intertemporal budget constraint. Recently the pop...

This thesis collects three interrelated chapters of empirical work, which are connected to each other in the sense of testing UK fiscal policy. The first chapter investigates whether the UK fiscal policy was consistent with an intertemporal budget constraint for a long period of time from 1955 to 2006. I find evidence of sustainability with three structural breaks, respectively occurring in the...

Nominal government debt, including the monetary base, is a residual claim to government surpluses. Thus, the value of Þat money can be determined in a completely frictionless economy, just like the price of stock. The main theoretical objection to this Þscal theory of the price level is that it mistreats the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. I show that the valuation equation for no...

This paper incorporates the well-documented part-time/fulltime wage differential into an empirical labor supply model with both a heterogeneityand a random-error term and estimates that model for women in the United States. Incorporation of the part-time/full-time wage differential results in a unique discontinuous, nonconvex budget set, and the consideration of estimation procedures previously...

I study a principal’s optimal choice of constraint for an agent participating in an auction (or auction-like allocation mechanism). I give necessary and sufficient conditions on the principal’s beliefs about the value of the item for a simple budget constraint to be the optimal contract. The results link the observed use of budget constraints to their use in models incorporating budgetconstrain...

This paper applies the theory of the soft budget constraint to explain some stylized facts regarding the outcomes and practice of international aid, including ineffectiveness, white elephants, and volatility. The soft budget constraint can also make aid counterproductive. Nonetheless, actual aid institutions may be constrained optimal responses to soft budgets and commonly suggested reforms suc...

Everyone likes Porsche but few can afford it. Budget constraints always play a critical role in a customer’s decision-making. The literature disproportionally focuses on how firms can induce customer valuations toward the product, but does not address how to assess the influence of budget constraints. We study these questions in the context of a referral reward program (RRP). RRP is a prominent...

Using a recursive empirical model of the real interest rate, GDP growth and the primary government deficit in the United States, I solve for the ergodic distribution of the debt/GDP ratio. If such a distribution exists, the government is satisfying its intertemporal budget constraint. One key finding is that historical fiscal policy would bring the current high-debt ratio back to its normal lev...