Fathers of hospitalized schizophrenic patients

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Both economic theory and evidence from the UK shows that state-funded healthcare which incorporates market-type incentives will save more lives and reduce more suffering

Commentary by Allyson Pollock et al misrepresents the findings of economic analyses of quasi-markets says Julian Le Grand. Looking at the evidence (and recognizing the defects of state agencies’ administration of healthcare) shows that quasi-markets with fixed prices perform better. Competitive mechanisms in the NHS were also supported by previous Labour reform

Academia, policy and politics.

In October 2003, I started a secondment from the London School of Economics (LSE), where I hold the Richard Titmuss Chair of Social Policy, to No 10 Downing Street, where I worked as a senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. I began working initially on a specific project: developing policies on extending user choice in public services, with particular reference to health care and education. Then I was asked to be the Prime Minister’s health policy adviser, a role I agreed to take on up to the general election that took place in May 2005. In the event I stayed on a few weeks after the election until August of that year, when I returned to LSE. So I worked for nearly two years in Downing Street. Mine was an unusual appointment. Most of my Downing Street colleagues were much younger than me; unlike me, all had had experience of working as political or policy advisers in government, despite their relative youth; and none were academics. Although interchange between government and academia is not uncommon in the United States, it is rare in the UK and other countries. So the editors of this journal felt that readers might be interested in my reflections on the experience, especially the differences between being an academic in a university and an academic in government: the squarish peg of academia in the round hole of politics and policy. Of course, the most obvious difference was in working style. As a senior academic at a good university, your time is broadly your own to allocate as you will – apart from the occasional lecture or seminar series, and even those you can usually re-arrange if necessary. But in government, as Harold Macmillan so famously noted, you are at the mercy of events. So often I would wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear about the latest outbreak of MRSA in a National Health Service (NHS) hospital or the mile-long queue of people waiting to register for a new NHS dentist, and know that the reflective paper the Prime Minister wanted on the pros and cons of more patient choice was going to have to be put off yet again. Rarely did days work out as planned; indeed, rarely did minutes work out as planned.

Environmental Agreements in a Two-Level Dynamic Framework

This paper addresses the issue of conflicts between countries who share a renewable natural resource using a two-level framework. Contrary to the usual modeling of countries as representative agents who sign an international treaty to protect the resource that they share, this research considers the existence of some interaction between different sort of consumers and firms within each country. It discusses the influence of both domestic characteristics (consumers´ preferences and firms´costs) and the presence of some national environmental policy on the resulting regional agreement. The international level is modeled as a dynamic game in which each government decides its domestic regulation. Agreements are viewed as the result of some sort of bargaining among countries. An important insight of this paper is the incorporation of a numerical simulation (for a linearquadratic example) to depict the dynamics of the model. In particular, its main result is an estimation of the path of emissions with the optimum treaty and without any agreement (the Markov Perfect equilibrium of the game).

Disposable Workforce in Italy

This paper explores the “disposable” patterns of workforce utilization in Italy. The term “disposable” reflects the fact that people enter the labor market, their services are “used” as a disposable commodity for few years, after which they leave the labor market and are no longer observable in the official data. Out of 100 new young entries, only 70 are still in the labor market 10 years after entry if their first job spell was at least one year long. For those – three times as many - whose first job is short (youth employment, unemployment, unemployment duration.