The Aggregate Demand for Private Health Insurance Coverage in the U.S.

This paper estimates the aggregate demand for private health insurance coverage in the U.S. using an error-correction model and by recognizing that people are without private health insurance for voluntary, structural, frictional, and cyclical reasons and because of public alternatives. Insurance coverage is measured both by the percentage of the population enrolled in private health insurance plans and the completeness of the insurance coverage. Annual data for the period 1966-1999 are used and both short and long run price and income elasticities of demand are estimated. The empirical findings indicate that both private insurance enrollment and completeness are relatively inelastic with respect to changes in price and income in the short and long run. Moreover, private health insurance enrollment is found to be inversely related to the poverty rate, particularly in the short-run. Finally, our results suggest that an increase in the number cyclically uninsured generates less of a welfare loss than an increase in the structurally uninsured

Models of Business Cycles: A Review Essay

This paper examines empirically two facets of labor force participation dynamics that imply quite different interpretations of labor market fluctuations. The first, which underlies equilibrium business cycle models, is that workers time their participation to coincide with periods of high real wages. The second, which implies the existence of involuntary unemployment during cyclical downturns, is that workers' current labor force status is heavily influenced by their work experience in the recent past. The authors' results suggest that these persistence effects are a key feature of labor force behavior, particularly for teenagers, adult women, and older men. In contrast, very little evidence could be found to support the intertemporal substitution hypothesis.

Efficient Unit Root Tests of real Exchange Rates in the Post-Bretton Woods Era

We apply the efficient unit-roots tests of Elliott, Rothenberg, and Stock (1996), and Elliott (1998) to twenty-one real exchange rates using monthly data of the G-7 countries from the post-Bretton Woods floating exchange rate period. Our results indicate that, for eighteen out of the twenty-one real exchange rates, the null hypothesis of a unit root can be rejected at the 10% significance level or better using the Elliot et al (1996) DF-GLS test. The unit-root null hypothesis is also rejected for one additional real exchange rate when we allow for one endogenously determined break in the time series of the real exchange rate as in Perron (1997). In all, we find favorable evidence to support long-run purchasing power parity in nineteen out of twenty-one real exchange rates. Second, we find no strong evidence to suggest that the use of non-U.S. dollar-based real exchange rates tend to produce more favorable result for long-run PPP than the use of U.S. dollar-based real exchange rates as Lothian (1998) has concluded

The Power of the Objective Bayesian Unit-Root Test

Some researchers, for example, Koop (1992), and Sims (1988), advocated for Bayesian alternatives to unit-root testing over the classical approach using the augmented Dickey-Fuller test (ADF). This paper studies the power of what Koop (1992) has called the Objective Bayesian approach to unit-root testing. Koop\u27s objective Bayesian test is interesting in light of the call by Phillips (1991a, 1991b) for more objective Bayesian analysis of time series. We apply the objective Bayesian unit-root test to a study of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) in the post-Bretton Woods era and also Monte Carlo simulations. Overall, our results suggest that the objective Bayesian test is biased in favor of trend-stationarity. We conclude that, at least for the objective Bayesian test, it is not better than the classical ADF approach in unit-root tests, and because of its bias, the objective priors suggested by Koop is not appropriate

Non-Parametric Tests of Real Exchange rates in the Post-Bretton Woods Era

This paper examines the mean-reverting property of real exchange rates. Earlier studies have generally not been able to reject the null hypothesis of a unit-root in real exchange rates, especially for the post-Bretton Woods floating period. The results imply that long-run purchasing power parity does not hold. More recent studies, especially those using panel unit-root tests, have found more favorable results, however. But, Karlsson and Löthgren (2000) and others have recently pointed out several potential pitfalls of panel unit-root tests. Thus, the panel unitroot test results are suggestive, but they are far from conclusive. Moreover, consistent individual country time series evidence that supports long-run purchasing power parity continues to be scarce. In this paper, we test for long memory using Lo’s (1991) modified rescaled range test, and the rescaled variance test of Giraitis, Kokoszka, Leipus, and Teyssière (2003). Our testing procedure provides a non-parametric alternative to the parametric tests commonly used in this literature. Our data set consists of monthly observations from April 1973 to April 200