Endogenous Work Hours and Practice Patterns of Canadian Physicians.

Using an extensive survey of Canadian physicians, this paper studies how physician practice patterns are shaped by demographic characteristics, physician specialty, and government policy. We model the simultaneous determination of group size, primary source of professional income (fee-for- service or salaried position), weekly hours of direct patient care, and total weekly hours of work. Coefficient estimates are precisely identified and are consistent with a life cycle model of self-employed professionals. Hours of work peak after about twenty years of practice and the probability of having a solo practice rises steadily with experience. With all else constant in the model, physicians who work under fee-for-service see patients 11 more hours each week than physicians who are primarily salaried, and yet fee-for-service physicians work only one or two hours more per week in total. Physicians in Quebec, the province with the strictest limits to physician billing in 1990, work significantly fewer hours than physicians in any of the other provinces and are more likely to work for a salary in large groups.PHYSICIANS;MEDICAL CARE

2011) Consumption Inequality and Intrahousehold Allocations The

Abstract The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within household inequality. In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of inequality along two dimensions. To illustrate this point we use a collective model of household behavior to estimate consumption inequality in the UK from 1968 to 2001. First, the use of adult equivalence scales underestimates the initial level of cross sectional consumption inequality by 50 percent, as large differences in the earnings of husbands and wives translate into large differences in consumption allocations within households. Second, we estimate the rise in between household inequality has been accompanied by an offsetting reduction in within household inequality. Our findings also indicate that increases in marital sorting on wages and hours worked can simultaneously explain two thirds of the decline in within household inequality and between a quarter and one-half of the rise in between household inequality for one and two adult households. JEL Classification: D12, D13, D63, J12, J2

Vital Texts and Bare Life: The Uses and Abuses of Life in Contemporary Fiction

The problem of writing life is one that has not dissipated in contemporary literature, if anything it has intensified. Past forms of countertexts turned to the subversive power of life, either with the avant-garde dissolution of text into life or by the modernist merging of life into the text. These forms often deployed a literary vitalism, which claimed a countertextual force through staking a claim on the power of life to overflow textual and political determinations. These currents, however, risk reinforcing forms of literary and capitalist value that draw on the powers of life. Instead, I argue, a different form of countertextuality can be found in contemporary autobiographical or confessional works, which by foregrounding the life of the author render the smooth translation of life into the text problematic. In particular, the work of the contemporary US writer Chris Kraus probes the relation between ‘vital texts’ and the experience of ‘bare life’ – life left exposed to power. Reconstructing her intervention, especially in her novel Summer of Hate [2012], reveals the possibilities of a new countertextual sensibility that turns to subjectivity and life without simply celebrating the expressive powers of life as the ground of literary and cultural value. Instead of a countertext that claims to express the power of life beyond the literary, Kraus develops a countertext in which life is exposed to abstract forms of power and so she allows us to trace the entanglement of life with value