Organizations & Markets

The rate of increase of longevity has varied considerably across U.S. states since 1991. This paper examines the effect of the quality of medical care, behavioral risk factors (obesity, smoking, and AIDS incidence), and other variables (education, income, and health insurance coverage) on life expectancy and medical expenditure using longitudinal state-level data. We examine the effects of three different measures of the quality of medical care.

For better or worse, most of us find ourselves surrounded by others whose goals and interests are not perfectly aligned with our own. And so each day, most of us face one or more versions of the same basic question: How hard should I push? When people assert themselves forcefully, they may get their way in some instrumental fashion, but they may fail to get along with their counterparts. When people forego pursuing their interests, they may get along with others, but their acquiescence may mean a failure to get their way.

Does private regulation work to provide and preserve collective benefits, and if so, when? To answer these questions, we focus on social structure and competitive exclusion. We argue that effective private regulation depends on social structures that support normative control of interested parties. However, competitive dynamics may transform private regulation into an instrument to defend the interest of institutional incumbents.

We examine early approaches to the agency problem by asking when captains owned ships in eigheenth and nineteenth century shipping, and how captain-ownership effected voyage success. For each ship we observe the identity of the owners, the identity of the ship captain, the route pursued for each voyage, and various outcome measures for each voyage. We also have information on vessel construction characteristics, the sailing history of each vessel, and the occupations of the owners.

In this chapter, I describe the coordinates of the global application of public-private partnerships (PPP) and identify central commonalities of sector collaboration for both infrastructure development and urban redevelopment/regeneration projects. The comparison across these two types of "hard" asset-based initiatives will, I hope, highlight the central issues of implementation and underscore the need for policymakers to address the nature of risk sharing, which I believe is central to the PPP strategy at the project level.

When the removal of trade barriers coincides with the elimination of inefficient institutions created to manage them, the gains from trade increase. We investigate the change in productivity associated with the removal of quotas on Chinese textile and clothing exporters as well as the elimination of the export licensing regime which managed quota allocation. When quotas were removed in 2005, Chinese export value and quantity surged and export prices declined.

The measurement and timing of reported revenue is critical to performance measurement and the development of accurate forecasting models. GM used incentives to get customers to buy its vehicles. This case asks students to consider how GM should report the sales so that the data is a valid indication of performance and can be used to accurately forecast future sales.

This paper investigates the impact of the introduction of new orphan drugs on premature mortality from rare diseases using longitudinal, disease-level data obtained from a number of major databases. The analysis is performed using data from two countries: the U.S. (during the period 1999-2006) and France (during the period 2000-2007).