Suchergebnisse

Objective: We wanted to determine the impact of a novel preventive care service (PCS) employing home visits by non-physician experts on the incidence of hip fractures among the elderly. Methods: We estimated an ARMA model for the time series of hip fractures in the Höganäs municipality in Sweden for the years 1987–2008. By means of intervention analysis and out of sample forecasts, we estimated the short- and long-term impact of the novel preventive care service. Results: We found that there is a statistically significant short-term impact of the PCS with about 8.27 fewer incidents of hip fracture. This corresponds to a long-term effect of about 3.74 fewer incidents of hip fracture per year. Conclusion: Since we found a statistically highly significant impact, we concluded that there was an effect on the number of hip fractures. Considering the magnitude of the effect, we found that the examined preventive care service is an economically efficient measure.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if credit markets believe in the existence of a central government guarantee and if this can be observed in the yield spread of the municipal sector. This is done by decomposing the municipal bond yield spread into liquidity and credit risk premiums by variance decomposition in a vector autoregressive setting – an approach which, to our knowledge, has not been previously suggested. Our results show that 62% or 50 basis points of the yield spread is explained by the chosen liquidity and credit variables. The liquidity risk premium makes up 35% or 28 basis points of the yield spread and credit makes up 27% or 22 basis points. Thus, investors and creditors in general do not believe in the existence of such a guarantee.