14,235 research outputs found
Opt Out Or Top Up? Voluntary Healthcare Insurance And The Public Vs. Private Substitution
We investigate whether people enrolled into voluntary health insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption, without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We study the case of Italy, where a mixed insurance system is in place. To this purpose, we specify a joint model for public and private specialist visits counts, and allow for different degrees of endogenous supplementary insurance coverage, looking at the insurance coverage as driven by a trinomial choice process. We disentangle the effect of income and wealth by going through two channels: the direct impact on the demand for healthcare and that due to selection into VHI. We find evidence of opting out: richer and wealthier individuals consume more private services and concomitantly reduce those services publicly provided through selection into for-profit VHI. These results imply that the market for VHI eases the redistribution from high income (doubly insured) individuals to low income (not doubly insured) ones operated by the Italian National Health Service (NHS). Accounting for VHI endogeneity in the joint model of the two counts is crucial to this conclusion.
Static quantum corrections to the Schwarzschild spacetime
We study static quantum corrections of the Schwarzschild metric in the
Boulware vacuum state. Due to the absence of a complete analytic expression for
the full semiclassical Einstein equations we approach the problem by
considering the s-wave approximation and solve numerically the associated
backreaction equations. The solution, including quantum effects due to pure
vacuum polarization, is similar to the classical Schwarzschild solution up to
the vicinity of the classical horizon. However, the radial function has a
minimum at a time-like surface close to the location of the classical event
horizon. There the g_{00} component of the metric reaches a very small but
non-zero value. The analysis unravels how a curvature singularity emerges
beyond this bouncing point. We briefly discuss the physical consequences of
these results by extrapolating them to a dynamical collapsing scenario.Comment: 10 pages; Talk given at QG05, Cala Gonone (Italy), September 200
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Law Enforcement and Firm Financing: Theory and Evidence
This paper investigates the economic effects on firms' policies of differences in law enforcement. We find that in judicial districts where trials are longer, bank financing is more costly and firms are smaller. However, we do not find any significant relation between law enforcement and firms' leverage ratio. We rationalize our results within a two- region dynamic general equilibrium model with asymmetric information and collateralized credit contracts. We find that a stronger enforcement of creditors' rights not only improves credit conditions (partial equilibrium effect), but also fosters individual capital accumulation (general equilibrium effect). In line with this theoretical prediction, we find a positive relation between individual savings and quality of legal enforcement
Multi-band spectroscopy of inhomogeneous Mott-insulator states of ultracold bosons
In this work, we use inelastic scattering of light to study the response of
inhomogeneous Mott-insulator gases to external excitations. The experimental
setup and procedure to probe the atomic Mott states are presented in detail. We
discuss the link between the energy absorbed by the gases and accessible
experimental parameters as well as the linearity of the response to the
scattering of light. We investigate the excitations of the system in multiple
energy bands and a band-mapping technique allows us to identify band and
momentum of the excited atoms. In addition the momentum distribution in the
Mott states which is spread over the entire first Brillouin zone enables us to
reconstruct the dispersion relation in the high energy bands using a single
Bragg excitation with a fixed momentum transfer.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure
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