This study proposes a new approach of measuring compliance costs of rules and regulations by focusing on labor input, and estimates the compliance costs in Japan based on a survey of workers. According to the results, the working hours required to comply with rules and regulations account for more than 20% of total labor input. By industry, this cost is higher in the finance and insurance industry followed by the health and welfare industry, and by firm size, it is higher in large firms. If these costs were halved, overall economic productivity would increase by about 8%.

States are increasingly adopting Medicaid managed care in efforts to address budgetary concerns. The intent is that by releasing Medicaid oversight to private organizations, competition will drive down healthcare expenditures so that savings may be passed to the state. Yet there are concerns that this competitive solution to cost savings might compromise safety-net hospitals. Managed care organizations cut costs by restricting the providers that enrollees are allowed to see. If movement in Medicaid patients disrupts safety-net hospitals' casemix, this could affect their ability to cross-subsidize care. This study estimates the impact of Medicaid managed care on safety-net hospitals by exploiting a Florida pilot program that required Medicaid recipients in five counties to enroll in managed care. The results suggest this mandate led to a small reduction in safety-net hospitals' average ratio of payment-to-cost. There is also some evidence that the effect on safety-net hospitals was disproportionate. This disproportionality was such that hospitals nearest the margin were pushed the furthest towards the edge.

We explore the determinants of inspection outcomes across 1.6 million Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) audits from 1990 through 2010. We find that discretion in enforcement differs in state and federally conducted inspections. State agencies are more sensitive to local economic conditions, finding fewer standard violations and fewer serious violations as unemployment increases. Larger companies receive greater lenience in multiple dimensions. Inspector issued fines and final fines, after negotiated reductions, are both smaller during Republican presidencies. Quantile regression analysis reveals that Presidential and Congressional party affiliations have their greatest impact on the largest negotiated reductions in fines.

This paper tests whether a series of changes to capital requirements transmitted to a change to banks' pricing policy. We compile a rich bank-level supervisory dataset covering the banking sector in the Czech Republic over the period 2004-2019. We estimate that the changes to the overall capital requirements did not force banks to alter their pricing policy. The impact on bank interest margins and loan rates is found to lie in a narrow range around zero irrespective of loan category. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects even for less-capitalised banks and small banks. The results obtained contradict estimates from other studies reporting significant transmission of capital regulation to lending rates and interest margins. We therefore engage in a deeper discussion of why this might be the case. Our estimates may be used in the ongoing discussion of the benefits and costs of capital-based regulation in banking.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions are an effective strategy to prevent and control COVID-19 transmission in the community. However, the timing and stringency to which these measures have been implemented varied between countries and regions. The differences in stringency can only to a limited extent be explained by the number of infections and the prevailing vaccination strategies. Our study aims to shed more light on the lockdown strategies and to identify the determinants underlying the differences between countries on regional, economic, institutional, and political level. Based on daily panel data for 173 countries and the period from January 2020 to October 2021 we find significant regional differences in lockdown strategies. Further, more prosperous countries implemented milder restrictions but responded more quickly, while poorer countries introduced more stringent measures but had a longer response time. Finally, democratic regimes and stronger manifested institutions alleviated and slowed down the introduction of lockdown measures.

The topic of pricing non-convexities in power markets has been explored vividly in the literature and among practitioners for the past twenty years. The debate has been focused on indivisibilities in short-term auctions, the computational tractability of some pricing proposals, and the economic analysis of their behavior. In this paper, we analyse a source of non-convexities that is not discussed as broadly: the indivisibilities in investment decisions. The absence of equilibrium that we are primarily concerned about is the equilibrium. We derive a capacity expansion model with indivisibilities and we highlight the issues arising from it. We discuss its relevance and address one particular argument for neglecting indivisibilities in investment, namely market size. We investigate to what extent a capacity market that clears discrete offers can mitigate the lumpiness problem. We particularly introduce the novel concept of convex hull pricing for capacity auctions. We illustrate the main findings with a numerical experiment conducted on the capacity expansion model used by ENTSO-E to assess the adequacy of the entire European system.