A representative sampling plan for auditing health insurance claims

A stratified sampling plan to audit health insurance claims is offered. The stratification is by dollar amount of the claim. The plan is representative in the sense that with high probability for each stratum, the difference in the average dollar amount of the claim in the sample and the average dollar amount in the population, is ``small.'' Several notions of ``small'' are presented. The plan then yields a relatively small total sample size with the property that the overall average dollar amount in the sample is close to the average dollar amount in the population. Three different estimators and corresponding lower confidence bounds for over (under) payments are studied.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921707000000094 in the IMS Lecture Notes Monograph Series (http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Managing the Faustian bargain: monetary autonomy in the pursuit of development in Eastern Europe and Latin America

International capital markets have grown to be a major force shaping today's world economy, presenting a range of opportunities and threats to developing countries. Capital market liberalization created large pools of much-needed capital that developing economies could access, but tapping these funds often came at the cost of increasing economic vulnerability, lost policy-making autonomy and a range of structural distortions that could ultimately undermine development in the long-term. As the potential threats of integrating one's country into global capital markets has become apparent, countries have devised a range of strategies to buffer themselves from the strains of global capital markets. This article considers the pursuit of monetary autonomy with reference to a typology of the strategies that policy-makers can use to open their markets to international capital, while simultaneously attempting to buffer themselves from the economic and political pressures of global financial integration. Such autonomy can be purchased in a myriad of ways, and a discussion of the choices facing Latin American and Eastern European countries is presented.capital market liberalization; monetary autonomy; financial policy; financial system stability

Information Inequality and Network Externalities: A Comparative Study of the Diffusion of Television and the Internet

This paper sheds light on whether intergroup inequality in Internet access is likely to persist as the diffusion process continues. To what extent is a given level of inequality in technology diffusion (e.g., use of the Internet) a long-term policy challenge or a temporary inconvenience? What general factors account for group-specific patterns of technology adoption? This paper draws on notions of network externalities to help answer this question. It also presents findings from a comparative analysis of household adoption of television from 1948 to 1957 and the Internet from 1994 to 2002.