A simple model of health insurance competition

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that contribution rate competition yields lower company profits and higher consumer welfare than premia competition when switching between insurance companies is costly. --Health Care Reform,Competition,Consumer Choice

Native Welfare Losses from High Skilled Immigration

This paper explores the effects of high skilled immigration to a host country with unionized low skilled labor and an unemployment insurance scheme. We show that such immigration can create a negative immigration surplus due to adverse effects on low skilled employment, provided that fiscal redistribution is not too intense and the elasticity between high and low skilled labor is high as empirical evidence suggests.immigration, trade union, unemployment, welfare state, elasticity of substitution

Educational Federalism and the Quality Effects of Tuition Fees

This paper investigates how the abolishment of a ban on tuition fees affects the quality of higher education with centralized and decentralized decision making. It is shown that tuition fees fully crowd public funds under centralization and quality of university education does not improve. However, with decentralized decisions total higher education spending increases in the tuition level. Therefore, decentralization can lead to a higher quality of university education than centralization although the opposite holds when funding is restricted to be public. --Higher Education,Federalism,Tuition Fees

University Funding Reform, Competition and Teaching Quality

This paper explores the impact of university funding reform on teaching quality competition. It shows that a graduate tax with differentiated, but state-regulated fees maximises the higher education surplus, whereas student grants as well as pure and income contingent loans do not. Fee autonomy for universities leads to results inferior to properly state controlled fees and can make the majority of students even worse off than a central student assignment system with very poor teaching incentives. --Higher Education,University Competition,Tuition Fees

Can Immigrant Employment Alleviate the Demographic Burden? The Role of Union Centralization

We examine how labor immigration affects public pensions under centralized wage setting. We show that immigration improves the sustainability of pay-as-you-go pensions if and only if total employment declines. This occurs if the labor demand elasticity exceeds the unemployment rate. --Immigration,Public Pensions,Trade Union

A Simple Model of Health Insurance Competition

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that contribution rate competition yields lower company profits and higher consumer welfare than premia competition when switching between insurance companies is costly.health care reform, competition, consumer choice

Educational Federalism and the Quality Effects of Tuition Fees

This paper investigates how the abolishment of a ban on tuition fees affects the quality of higher education with centralized and decentralized decision making. It is shown that a marginal introduction of tuition fees fully crowds out public funds under centralization, whereas educational quality improves under decentralization. However, if the government has full discretion about the tuition fee level, centralization leads to the efficient quality, fully extracting the income gains from the graduates, while decentralization typically induces inefficiently low spending levels.higher education, federalism, tuition fees

Price ceilings and quality competition

This paper investigates the quality implications of an upper limit on product prices in a vertically differentiated duopoly. It is shown that a price ceiling diminishes the incentives for strategic product differentiation, thereby improving average quality in the market.

Growth and Social Security: The Role of Human Capital

This paper studies the growth and efficiency effects of pay-as-you-go financed social security when human capital is the engine of growth. Employing a variant of the Lucas (1988) model with overlapping generations, it is shown that a properly designed unfunded social security system leads to higher output growth than a fully funded one. Furthermore, the economy with unfunded social security is efficient while the other one is not. These results stand in sharp contrast to those that obtain in models where economic growth is driven by physical capital accumulation.Endogenous Growth, Social Security, Human Capital