The Samaritan’s Dilemma and public health insurance

When the government cannot commit to withdraw from providing charity health care, as is the case when it faces the Samaritan's Dilemma, a pub- lic health insurance scheme can be Pareto improving. However, the large heterogeneity in the design of such schemes observed around the world begs the question of what characterizes the optimal public health insurance plan. In this paper, we examine the distortions created by three plans, nested in terms of the constraints they place on the individual's decision problem. We ¯nd that linking public health insurance bene¯ts to the use of a certain type of health care, such as treatment in public hospitals, creates incentives against the e±cient use of higher quality health care. When such constraint is lifted, but the public insurance scheme still determines a minimum level of coverage for each illness, ¯rst best e±ciency is achieved. It turns out that placing constraints in the form of minimum levels of coverage for each illness is necessary for e±ciency. Removing such constraint decreases the relative price of high quality care for a subset of illnesses, and leads to too much high quality care used in equilibrium. This analysis suggests that the widespread practice of determining illness by illness coverage in public health insurance systems has an e±ciency rationale, despite the administrative and informational di±culties that it entails.Samaritan's Dilemma, Health insurance.

Needs assessment final report

The stated purposes of the Management Science Faculty Fellowship Project were to: (1) provide a comprehensive analysis of KSC management training for engineers and other management professionals from project/program lead through executive levels; and (2) development of evaluation methodologies which can be used to perform ongoing program-wide course-to-course assessments. This report will focus primarily in the first stated purpose for the project. Ideally, the analysis of KSC management training will build in the current system and efficiently propose improvements to achieve existing goals and objectives while helping to identify new visions and new outcomes for the Center's Management Training Mission. Section 2 describes the objectives, approach, and specific tasks used to analyze KSC's Management training System. Section 3 discusses the main conclusions derived from an analysis of the available training data. Section 4 discusses the characteristics and benefits envisioned for a Management Training System. Section 5 proposes a Training System as identified by the results of a Needs Assessment exercise conducted at KSC this summer. Section 6 presents a number of recommendations for future work

Salient Object Detection via Augmented Hypotheses

In this paper, we propose using \textit{augmented hypotheses} which consider objectness, foreground and compactness for salient object detection. Our algorithm consists of four basic steps. First, our method generates the objectness map via objectness hypotheses. Based on the objectness map, we estimate the foreground margin and compute the corresponding foreground map which prefers the foreground objects. From the objectness map and the foreground map, the compactness map is formed to favor the compact objects. We then derive a saliency measure that produces a pixel-accurate saliency map which uniformly covers the objects of interest and consistently separates fore- and background. We finally evaluate the proposed framework on two challenging datasets, MSRA-1000 and iCoSeg. Our extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: IJCAI 2015 pape

The Relation Between Macroeconomic Uncertainty And The Expected Performance Of the Economy

By using data from surveys of expectations, it is shown that macroeconomic uncertainty, measured by the standard deviation of the expected output growth, the expected unemployment rate, and the expected inflation rate, is negatively related to the expected performance of the economy, proxied by the expected growth rate of output. That is, forward-looking agents are more uncertain about the future development of output, unemployment, and inflation when the growth rate of output is expected to fall, and they are less uncertain when this growth rate is expected to increase. The findings indicate that macroeconomic polices would have asymmetric effects on output depending upon how economic agents expect the economy to perform in the near futureMacroeconomic uncertainty, expectations, expected macroeconomic performance

Privatization in development : some lessons from experience

This paper briefly reviews the main theories of state versus private ownership and empirical evidence on the impact of privatization in developing countries (including transition economies). The paper draws some lessons for policy and offers some suggestions on how to assess privatization, at least in countries where there is still scope for it. The paper suggests that although understanding of the efficiency gains of privatization has increased significantly in recent years, there is an important area about which little is known: the distributional effects of privatization. Whether arguing from the standpoint of welfare economics or political economy, distributional effects are critical to the outcome, or the perceived outcome, of privatization. Thus, there is a need to fully evaluate the ex ante and ex post impacts of privatization, the most effective types of regulation and ownership regimes, and the way in which losers, when there are any, can be compensated. This is a need that must be met by academics and development agencies, including the World Bank and regional development banks.Banks&Banking Reform,Privatization,Emerging Markets,Infrastructure Regulation,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress

Learning from developing country experience : growth and economic thought before and after the 2008-09 crisis

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it documents the changing global landscape before and after the crisis, emphasizing the shift towards multipolarity. In particular, it emphasizes the ascent of developing countries in the global economy before, during, and after the crisis. Second, it explores what these global economic changes and the recent crisis imply for shifts in the direction of research in development economics. The paper places a particular emphasis on the lessons that developed countries can learn from the developing world.Achieving Shared Growth,Emerging Markets,Population Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Debt Markets

Optimal Government Regulations and Red Tape in an Economy with Corruption

We study an economy where agents are heterogeneous in entrepreneurial ability, and may decide to become workers or entrepreneurs. The government is motivated by a production externality to impose regulations on entrepreneurship, and sets a level of red tape -administered by public officials-to test regulation compliance. In an environment where some officials are corrupt, we study what are the optimal levels of regulations and red tape, and to what extent such policies reduce the welfare losses created by corruption. For each level of externalities, we find that high and low levels of corruption create qualitatively different distortions, which in turn changes the nature and reach of optimal policies. Under low levels of corruption and externalities, the government sets low levels of regulations and minimal red tape, and with these policies achieves the first best allocation. When externalities and corruption are above a threshold, only a second best allocation can be achieved. Moreover, when externalities are large, mandating higher levels of red tape is a Pareto improving policy.Corruption, optimal policy, red tape, regulations.