Sessions
2005Sessions
2005
22 JUNY 2005
THE EVOLUTION OF INEQUITY IN THE ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE IN SPAIN: (1987-200)
Angel López Nicolás , Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena
TThis paper reports an analysis of the evolution of equity in access to health care in Spain over the period 1987-2001, a time span covering the development of the modern Spanish National Health System. Our measures of access are the probabilities of visiting a doctor, using emergency services and being hospitalised. For these three measures we obtain indices of horizontal inequity from microeconometric models of utilization that exploit the individual information in the Spanish National Health Surveys of 1987 and 2001. We find that by 2001 the system has improved in the sense that differences in income no longer lead to different access given the same level of need. However, the tenure of private health insurance leads to differences in access given the same level of need, and its contribution to inequity has increased over time, both because insurance is more concentrated among the rich and because the elasticity of utilization for the three services has increased too.
15 JUNY 2005
DID SPAIN GAIN SO MUCH FROM THE RAILROADS? THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE RAILROAD TECHNOLOGY TO SPANISH ECONOMIC GROWTH (1848-1914)
Alfonso Herranz Loncán, UB
TThe social saving literature has long insisted in the “indispensability” of the railroads for Spanish economic growth. This paper moves from this literature and applies growth accounting techniques to evaluate the actual growth contribution of the railroad technology in Spain . This requires the measurement of TFP growth in the railroad sector, for which the necessary data are missing. As a substitute, the growth of Spanish railroad TFP is approached both by estimating a cost function and by using the information included in the available social saving estimates. The outcomes of the measurement exercise indicate that the actual contribution of railroads to economic growth was much lower in Spain than in the UK , due to the low importance that railroad transport reached within the country GDP before 1913.
1 JUNY 2005
COMPETITION IN LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CAPITAL ALLOCATION
Nicolas Marceau
This paper studies interjurisdictional competition in the fight against crime and its impact on occupational choice and the allocation of capital. In a world where capital is mobile, jurisdictions are inhabited by individuals who choose to become workers or criminals. Because the return of the two occupations depends on capital, and because investment in capital in a jurisdiction depends on its crime rate, there is a bi-directional relationship between capital investment and crime which may lead to capital concentration. By investing in costly law enforcement, a jurisdiction makes the choice of becoming a criminal less attractive, which reduces the number of criminals and makes its territory more secure. This increased security increases the attractiveness of the jurisdiction for investors and this can eventually translate into more capital being invested. We characterize the Nash equilibria — some entailing a symmetric outcome, others an asymmetric one — and study their efficiency.
25 MAIG 2005
ALMOST EFFICIENT TAX COMPETITION
Nicolas Marceau
11 MAIG 2005
AUCTIONS AND COOPERATIVE GAMES
Stef Tijs and Rodica Branzei
In a natural way big boss games and peer group games arise in studying auction situations. A link between these classes of cooperative games is given and the existence of monotonic allocation schemes there is studied.
22 ABRIL 2005
Mireia Jofre-Bonet, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and London School of
Economics, London, UK
This paper studies polydrug use patterns in heroin and cocaine addicts. We use data on two experiments to measure the elasticity of several addictive drugs with respect to heroin and cocaine prices. Own and cross price elasticities are estimated while controlling for non-price related sources of variance. The results indicate that heroin addicts have an inelastic demand for heroin, complement heroin consumption with cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol, and substitute Valium and cigarettes for heroin.
Additionally, heroin addicts have an inelastic demand for cocaine, and they complement cocaine with heroin and alcohol, and substitute it for marijuana, Valium and cigarettes. Cocaine addicts have an elastic demand for cocaine, they complement cocaine with heroin and they substitute it for marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes.
Cocaine addicts’ demand for heroin is negatively affected by heroin prices; in this group, cocaine and cigarettes are a complement to heroin, and marijuana, alcohol, and Valium are substitutes. This work illustrates that controlled experiments may provide useful information about preferences about combinations of licit and illicit drugs in a difficult to study group. The more that is known about how specific populations complement and substitute their addictions, the better we can design and calibrate drug policies and health care initiatives.
13 ABRIL 2005
INNOVATION AND COMPETITIVE PRESSURE
Xavier Vives, INSEAD
I analyze the effects of competition on process and product innovation and obtain robust results that hold for a variety of market structures, including markets with restricted or free entry and markets characterized by either price or quantity competition. It is found that increasing the number of firms tends to reduce R&D effort, whereas increasing the degree of product substitutability, with or without free entry, increases R&D effort–provided that the total market for varieties does not shrink. Increasing the total market size increases R&D effort and has ambiguous effects on the number of varieties while decreasing the cost of entry increases the number of entrants and varieties but reduces R&D effort per variety.
2
MARÇ 2005
EFECTOS
DE LA DESCENTRALIZACIÓN DE LA POLÍTICA DE DEFENSA DE LA COMPETENCIA
Juan Luís Jiménez i Javier Campos, U. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
En los últimos años, tanto en la Unión Europea como en España, se ha procedido a descentralizar algunos aspectos relevantes de la política de defensa de la competencia. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la interacción entre información y riesgo de captura asociada a esta nueva situación, partiendo de algunos modelos clásicos de regulación. Nuestros resultados confirman que, desde el punto de vista de los precios y la eficiencia productiva, la descentralización supone una mejora al incrementar la información que posee la agencia de la competencia sobre las empresas. Sin embargo, el riesgo de captura puede ser mayor, diluyendo así esa ventaja inicial y haciendo que la descentralización, especialmente, si no va acompañada de una independencia política de la agencia, no genere resultados globales mejores que los de la centralización.
16
FEBRER 2005
EL SECTOR ELÈCTRIC ESPANYOL DES DE LA PERSPECTIVA
INDUSTRIAL
Joaquim Solà i Ignasi Nieto, UB