The importance of employer sponsorship in the long-term care insurance market

Medicare and Medicaid are major sources of long-term care payments and thus will bear much of the burden from the growth in long-term care service use. The large future demand for long-term care services is of great concern among policymakers due to its expense and the use of public program dollars. It is argued that the individual purchase of long-term care insurance can help alleviate the increasing financial pressure on public programs responsible for the majority of longterm care financing. However, consumers have shown little interest in insuring against the high costs of long-term care. This analysis examines the effect of several factors on the decision to purchase a long-term care insurance policy: knowledge and attitudes of long-term care insurance and the long-term care financing system, the perceived risk for longterm care, financial planning behavior, and the availability of long-term care insurance. The interim results indicate the factor most likely to affect the decision to purchase long-term care insurance is access to employer-sponsored long-term care insurance. This suggests tht the availability of affordable and high quality coverage is more important than demand-side factors such as awareness of long-term care insurance and a perceived greater risk for long-term care.     

Use of balanced bipartite weighing designs as chemical balance designs

This paper deals with the use of balanced bipartite weighing designs as chemical balance designs when there Is a restriction on the number of objects that can be placed on either pan..The variance of each estimated weight and the covarlance of each pair of estimated weights are worked out.The use of additional weighing when the design matrix is singular is discussed.     

The foundations of econometrics-are there any

The conclusions of alogically consistent economic theory which strictly adheres to Aristotle's axioms of logic are factually true if its sufficient conditions are all factually true. Alternatively, if a conclusion of such a theory is false, then at- least one of its assumptions is false. Unfortunately, the factual truth of sufficient conditions cannot be established because the problem of induction i s impossible t o solve. It is algo true that the falsity of a conclusion cannot be established in the presence of uncertainty. While the philosophy of instrumentalism applied to sufficient and logically consistent explanations may provide useful solutions to immediate practical problems, the principles of simplicity, parsimony and profligacy--all of them requiring conditional deductive arguments--are useless as criteria for model choice.     

Minimum average risk estimators for coefficients in linear models

We consider the problem of estimating the coefficient vector β of a linear regression model with quadratic loss function. Some biased estimators which utilize the prior information about β are considered. Also studied is the problem of estimating the parameters of an over-identified structural equation from undersized samples.     

Further Results on Zellner's Minimum Expected Loss and Full Information Maximum Likelihood Estimators for Undersized Samples

The article presents a consistent set of conditions that a prior pdf for the reduced-form parameters must satisfy if Zellner's MELO estimators for the structural coefficients of a linear structural econometric model are to exist in all normal cases where the available sample is undersized. Also, the conditions under which the full information maximum likelihood estimators of structural coefficients exist are given. Finally, the article reports application of MELO estimation to Klein's Model I.     

Optimum spring balance weighing designs for estimating the total weight

The problem of estimation of the total weight or objects using a spring balance weighing design has been deait with in this paper Based on a theorem by Dey and Gupta (1977) giving a lower bound for the variance of the estimated total weight, a necessary and sufficient condition for this lower bound to be attained is obtained. A few special cases where the lower bound is attained are enumerated.     

An examination of distributed lag model coefficients estimated with smoothness priors

The estimator for the coefficients of a distributed lag model with smoothness priors proposed by Shi Her (1973) is examined and an alternative ridge-type estimator is obtained utilizing restricted least squares approach, A Monte Carlo experiment is carried out to compare the behavior of these estimators.     

Robustness of theil's mixed regression estimators

An efficient method for incorporating incomplete prior information in regression analysis was developed by Theil [1963]. In this paper we take up the estimator of coefficients given by this procedure and study its robustness to departures from normality of prior estimators of coefficients. The use of incomplete or biased prior information in regression analysis is also considered and a new estimator for the regression coefficient is suggested.     

Preferences for receipt of care among community-dwelling adults

Preferences for long-term care alternatives include both place of care and persons to provide care. In this analysis, these elements are separated for mature adults (N-1503, ages 40-70) regarding future care needs. Most adults preferred care in home/community settings by kin or non-kin, with few deeming nursing homes acceptable. Demographics and personal knowledge, experience, and expectations were marginally likely to influence preferences; males were more likely to prefer care in paid/professional settings. Women, who more often expressed preference for kin/home care, face demographic trends reducing available female kin who might be caregivers.