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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient?, Alan M. Garber, Jonathan Skinner Sep 2008

Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient?, Alan M. Garber, Jonathan Skinner

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Credit Elasticities In Less-Developed Economies: Implications For Microfinance, Dean S. Karlan, Jonathan Zinman Jun 2008

Credit Elasticities In Less-Developed Economies: Implications For Microfinance, Dean S. Karlan, Jonathan Zinman

Dartmouth Scholarship

Policymakers often prescribe that microfinance institutions increase interest rates to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. This strategy makes sense if the poor are rate insensitive: then microlenders increase profitability (or achieve sustainability) without reducing the poor's access to credit. We test the assumption of price inelastic demand using randomized trials conducted by a consumer lender in South Africa. The demand curves are downward sloping, and steeper for price increases relative to the lender's standard rates. We also find that loan size is far more responsive to changes in loan maturity than to changes in interest rates, which is consistent with …


Information Aggregation In Polls, John Morgan, Phillip C. Stocken Jun 2008

Information Aggregation In Polls, John Morgan, Phillip C. Stocken

Dartmouth Scholarship

We study information transmission via polling. A policymaker polls constituents, who differ in their information and ideology, to determine policy. Full revelation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample, but not with a large one. In large polls, full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists, who respond truthfully, and extremists, who do not. We find polling statistics that ignore strategic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the poll's margin of error. We construct estimators that account for strategic behavior. Finally, we compare polls and elections.


Planning And Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?, Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell May 2008

Planning And Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?, Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. It shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole. In addition, women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan …


Preference Heterogeneity And Insurance Markets: Explaining A Puzzle Of Insurance, David M. Cutler, Amy Finkelstein, Kathleen Mcgarry May 2008

Preference Heterogeneity And Insurance Markets: Explaining A Puzzle Of Insurance, David M. Cutler, Amy Finkelstein, Kathleen Mcgarry

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Productivity Spillovers In Healthcare: Evidence From The Treatment Of Heart Attacks, Amitabh Chandra, Douglas O. Staiger Apr 2008

Productivity Spillovers In Healthcare: Evidence From The Treatment Of Heart Attacks, Amitabh Chandra, Douglas O. Staiger

Dartmouth Scholarship

A large literature in medicine documents variation across areas in the use of surgical treatments that is unrelated to outcomes. Observers of this phenomena have invoked “flat of the curve medicine” to explain these facts, and have advocated for reductions in spending in high-use areas. In contrast, we develop a simple Roy model of patient treatment choice with productivity spillovers that can generate the empirical facts. Our model predicts that high-use areas will have higher returns to surgery, better outcomes among patients most appropriate for surgery, and worse outcomes among patients least appropriate for surgery, while displaying no relationship between …


Do Buyer-Size Discounts Depend On The Curvature Of The Surplus Function? Experimental Tests Of Bargaining Models, Hans-Theo Normann, Bradley J. Ruffle, Christopher M. Snyder Jan 2008

Do Buyer-Size Discounts Depend On The Curvature Of The Surplus Function? Experimental Tests Of Bargaining Models, Hans-Theo Normann, Bradley J. Ruffle, Christopher M. Snyder

Dartmouth Scholarship

A number of recent theoretical papers have shown that, for buyer‐size discounts to emerge in a bargaining model, the total surplus function over which parties bargain must have certain nonlinearities. We test the theory in an experimental setting in which a seller bargains with a number of buyers of different sizes. Nonlinearities in the surplus function are generated by varying the shape of the seller's cost function. Consistent with the theory, we find that quantity discounts emerge only in the case of increasing marginal cost, corresponding to a concave surplus function. We provide additional structural estimates to help identify the …


Education And The Age Profile Of Literacy Into Adulthood, Elizabeth Cascio, Damon Clark, Nora Gordon Jan 2008

Education And The Age Profile Of Literacy Into Adulthood, Elizabeth Cascio, Damon Clark, Nora Gordon

Dartmouth Scholarship

American teenagers perform considerably worse on international assessments of achievement than do teenagers in other high-income countries. This observation has been a source of great concern since the first international tests were administered in the 1960s. But does this skill gap persist into adulthood? We examine this question using the first international assessment of adult literacy, conducted in the 1990s. We find that, consistent with other assessments of the school-age population, U.S. teenagers perform relatively poorly, ranking behind teenagers in the twelve other rich countries surveyed. However, by their late twenties, Americans compare much more favorably to their counterparts abroad: …


Will The Stork Return To Europe And Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations, James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, Ariel Dora Stern Jan 2008

Will The Stork Return To Europe And Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations, James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, Ariel Dora Stern

Dartmouth Scholarship

We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home production. We observe three distinct phases in women's status generated by the gradual increase in women's workforce opportunities. In the earliest phase, characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, women earn low wages relative to men and are expected to shoulder all of the child care at home. As a result, most women specialize in home production …