1,721,023 research outputs found
To Switch or Not to Switch Payment Scheme? Determinants and Effects in a Bargaining Game
Full text linkThe incentive scheme selected in a laboratory experiment might trigger\ud
different type of behavior in participants. This paper is an attempt to screen\ud
the strategies adopted by agents in a bargaining game when buyer and seller\ud
have partly conflicting interests and are asymmetrically informed. We allow\ud
participants to choose the incentive scheme through which they will be paid\ud
at the end of the experiment controlling for past experience and individual\ud
characteristics. It is well known that payment method is highly correlated to\ud
the risk preferences shown by individuals, but little research is devoted to the\ud
analysis of the behavior induced by Random Lottery Incentive scheme (RLI\ud
for short) and Cumulative Scheme payment (CS for short) both on individual\ud
and social results. This paper aims to fill the gap
Extending health insurance in Ghana: effects of the National Health Insurance Scheme on maternity care
Full text linkBackground
There is considerable interest in exploring the potential of social health insurance in Africa where a number of countries are currently experimenting with different approaches. Since these schemes have been introduced recently and are continuously evolving, it is important to evaluate their effectiveness in the enhancement of health care utilization and reduction of out-of-pocket expenses for potential policy suggestions.
Objective
To investigate how the National Health Insurance Schemes (NHIS) in Ghana affects the utilization of maternal health care services and medical out-of-pocket expenses.
Methods
We used nationally-representative household data from the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS). We analyzed the 2014 GDHS focusing on four outcome variables, i.e. antenatal check up, delivery in a health facility, delivery assisted by a trained person and out-of-pocket expenditure. We estimated probit and bivariate probit models to take into account the issue of self selection into the health insurance schemes.
Results
The results suggest that, also taking into account the issue of self selection into the health insurance schemes, the NHIS enrollment positively affects the probability of formal antenatal check-ups before delivery, the probability of delivery in an institution and the probability of being assisted during delivery by a trained person. On the contrary, we find that, once the issue of self-selection is taken into account, the NHIS enrollment does not have a significant effect on out-of-pocket expenditure at the extensive margin.
Conclusion
Since a greater utilization of health-care services has a strong positive effect on the current and future health status of women and their children, the health-care authorities in Ghana should make every effort to extend this coverage. In particular, since the results of the first step of the bivariate probit regressions suggest that the educational attainment of women is a strong determinant of enrollment, and those with low education and unable to read are less likely to enroll, information on the NHIS should be disseminated in ways that reach those with little or no education. Moreover, the availability of government health facilities in a region is associated with higher likelihood of enrollment in the NHIS. Accordingly, extending geographical access is an important strategy for expanding NHIS membership and improving access to health-care
The explanatory and predictive power of non two-stage-probability theories of decision making under ambiguity
No full textRepresenting ambiguity in the laboratory using a Bingo Blower (which is transparent and not manipulable) and asking the subjects a series of allocation questions (which are more efficient than pairwise choice questions), we obtain data from which we can estimate by maximum likelihood methods (with explicit assumptions about the errors made by the subjects) a significant subset of the empirically relevant models of behaviour under ambiguity, and compare their relative explanatory and predictive abilities. Our results suggest that not all recent models of behaviour represent a major improvement in explanatory and predictive power, particularly the more theoretically sophisticated ones
The valorization of human capital as a key element of competitiveness: the trust game corporation perspective
Full text linkWe conceive firm productive activity as being crucially determined by the performance of complex tasks which possess the characteristics of trust games. We show that in trust games with superadditivity the non cooperative solution yielding a suboptimal firm output is the Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium (SPNE) of the uniperiodal full information game when i) the trustor has superior stand alone contribution to output and ii) the superadditive component is inferior to the sum of trustee and trustor stand alone contributions to output. We show that, if relational preferences of the two players are sufficiently high, the result is reversed. We also document that the Folk Theorem applies to the infinitely repeated game, even in absence of relational preferences, but the enforceable cooperative equilibrium is not renegotiation proof. We finally show that the cooperative equilibrium is not attainable under single winner tournament schemes and that steeper pay for performance schemes may crowd out information sharing in presence of players preferences for relational goods. Our findings help to explain why firms are reluctant to use pay for performance and tournament incentive schemes and why they invest money to increase the quality of relational goods among employees
Essays on Health Economics
No full textLa tesi si concentra su tre diverse problematiche largamente dibattute nell’Economia Sanitaria: la relazione tra obesità e conseguenze sul mercato del lavoro, azzardo morale causato dall’assicurazione sanitaria su comportamenti legati alla salute e la valutazione di un’iniziativa di assistenza per coinvolgere e mantenere in cura individui marginalizzati affetti da HIV.
Il primo capitolo, “Wages and Weight in Europe: Evidence using Quantile Regression Model”, studia l’aspetto economico del crescente tasso di obesità in Europa, esaminando la relazione tra obesità e salari utilizzando dati per nove Paesi ottenuti dall’European Community Household Panel (ECHP) nel periodo 1998-2001. L’apporto originale rispetto alla letteratura esistente consiste nell’approccio della Regressione Quantilica per caratterizzare l’impatto eterogeneo dell’obesità su diversi punti della distribuzione salariale. I nostri risultati mostrano che i) l’evidenza ottenuta dalle regressioni sulla media nascondono gran parte dell’eterogeneità poiché la relazione tra obesità e salari differisce tra Paesi e quantili salariali, e ii) aspetti culturali, ambientali o istituzionali non sono in grado di spiegare le differenze tra Paesi, lasciando spazio all’ipotesi di un puro effetto di discriminazione nei confronti degli obesi nel mercato del lavoro.
Il secondo capitolo, “Does Health Insurance make you fat?”, esamina se l’assicurazione sanitaria causa azzardo morale nei comportamenti associati al peso corporeo. Le spese per le cure sanitarie tra gli obesi, sono maggiori rispetto a quelle degli individui con peso corporeo regolare, e in assenza di premi assicurativi che tengono conto del rischio, gli individui sono protetti dai maggiori costi per le cure mediche associate all’obesità. Comunque, anche quando i premi dell’assicurazione sanitaria tengono conto del rischio, gli individui possono adottare scelte inefficienti rispetto ai comportamenti alimentari e all’attività fisica che portano all’obesità. In questo capitolo sviluppiamo un semplice modello teorico a due periodi in cui gli individui decidono quante risorse allocare per il consumo, risparmio e cure preventive per caratterizzare le esternalità dell’assicurazione sanitaria e mostriamo come l’effetto di azzardo morale può essere neutralizzato dall’avversione al rischio. Utilizziamo dati dal National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) per il periodo 1989-2004 per stimare empiricamente il modello ed esaminare la relazione tra assicurazione sanitaria offerta dal datore di lavoro e peso corporeo, così come la relazione tra assicurazione sanitaria e attività fisica. Troviamo scarsa evidenza empirica per supportare l’esistenza di importanti esternalità in questo mercato, mettendo in discussione l’opportunità di un intervento governativo in risposta ai crescenti tassi di obesità.
Il terzo capitolo, “Does Retention in Care Increase Life Expectancy? Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of an Outreach Program”, è un’analisi costi benefici di strategie utilizzate per coinvolgere e mantenere in cura individui marginalizzati affetti da HIV negli Stati Uniti. L’Outreach Initiative (2004-2006), finanziata da Special Programs of National Significance (SPNS) è la principale fonte di dati per questa analisi. Abbiamo sviluppato un modello Markov per predirre le aspettative di vita dei partecipanti al programma basato su cambiamenti sul CD4 count, viral load, AIDS e aderenza a Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART), avvenuti durante sei mesi di partecipazione al programma. Attraverso dati estrapolati dalla letteratura clinica, confrontiamo questo gruppo di intervento con un ipotetico gruppo di controllo e i nostri risultati mostrano come i partecipanti al programma hanno 1.415 anni di vita attesi in più rispetto ai non partecipanti, tenendo conto della qualità della vita. Incorporando i costi del programma nel modello, otteniamo che ciascun anno addizionale di vita costa 4,718 per person. Filling the void in HIV/AIDS research on costs and long term impacts of outreach interventions, this result suggests that the program is highly cost effective, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) thresholds for cost effectiveness analysis
Changes in Individual and/or Aggregate?
Full text linkThe majority of papers reporting the results of experimental tests on individual behaviour concentrate on the average or aggregate behaviour of the subjects, even though different subjects may exhibit different kinds of behaviour. At the same time it is well-known that subjects are noisy in their responses, and thus may change their behaviour during an experiment. The question then arises as to whether this noise causes average behaviour to change during an experiment. We take the data from an experiment on behaviour under ambiguity, which try to identify which preference functional subjects are using, and analyse it in two halves. We find that, while some individual preferences seem to change from the first to the second half, on average, preferences are unchanged (though there is a reduction in the noise exhibited by subjects in the second half). This is a reassuring message for those who want to draw inferences from experiments
The explanatory and predictive power of non two-stage-probability theories of decision making under ambiguity
Full text linkRepresenting ambiguity in the laboratory using a Bingo Blower (which is transparent and not manipulable) and asking the subjects a series of allocation questions, we obtain data from which we can estimate by maximum likelihood methods (with explicit assumptions about the errors made by the subjects) a signicant subset of particular parameterisations of the empirically relevant models of behaviour unde ambiguity, and compare their relative explanatory and predictive abilities. Our results suggest that not all recent models of behaviour represent a major improvement in explanatory and predictive power, particularly the more theoretically sophisticated ones
Does “soft conditionality” increase the impact of cash transfers on desired outcomes? Evidence from a randomized control trial in Lesotho
Full text linkCash transfers programs have been shown to have positive effects on a variety of outcomes. While much of the literature focuses on the role of conditionality in achieving desired impact, this paper focuses on the role of ‘soft conditionality’ implemented through both ‘labeling’ and ‘messaging’ in evaluating the impact of the Child Grants Program in Lesotho, an unconditional cash transfer targeting poor households with orphans and vulnerable children. Beneficiary households received a clear message that the transfer should be spent on the interest and needs of children. Our findings are based on a randomized experiment and suggest that ‘soft conditionality’ does play a strong role in increasing expenditure for children, especially on education, clothing and footwear. Results indicate in fact that transfer income is spent differently from general income as it exerts both an income and a substitution effect. This behavioral change is confirmed by comparing the ex-ante expected behaviors with the ex-post actual response to the program. We find that for expenditure categories linked to the wellbeing of children the ex-post response was much higher than the ex-ante expected behavior
Le discriminazioni retributive: un approccio giuridico ed economico
No full textThe aim of the present work is to address the issue of gender wage discrimination from a legal and economic point of view. This dual approach is motivated by the need to provide food for thought on a twofold reality characterized on the one hand by a large set of rules that have bans wage discrimination against women and on the other hand by consolidated empirical evidence that shows significant gender wage differentials. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to present legal profiles and to provide a framework for the economic section. Therefore, it deals with the right to equal treatment and the prohibition of discrimination with a special focus on women's wages. In the second part, after a short overview of the official data on wage differentials provided by statistical institutions, the paper discusses important contributions to the empirical literature performed through the statistical and econometric analysis. This kind of approach allows to disentangle the wage differentials “explained” by observable individual characteristics, such as education, work experience, employment sector and occupational status, from the wage differential “unexplained” and therefore potentially due to pure gender discrimination
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