We are indebted to Andres Rodriguez-Clare for extremely insightful comments that were critical to the analysis in this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

BackgroundIt is important to know the current level of primary care performance in order to evaluate and plan for desirable health policy. We tried to compare patient's assessment of primary (family physician, general practitioner, internist, pediatrician, and general surgeon) and non-primary (the other specialties) care physicians.MethodsStudy subjects were physicians of primary care clinics in Seoul. The study subject evaluators were Seoul citizens who were selected by a list-assisted random digit dialing sampling method and who had visited their primary care clinic on six or more occasions over a period of more than 6 months as a usual source of care. The modified version of the Korean Primary Care Assessment Tool was used for the evaluation of primary care performance. The data were collected with the aid of a computer-assisted telephone interview system from June 29 to July 22, 2009.ResultsThe data on 260 individuals were used for analysis. The mean scores of primary and non-primary care physician group were respectively 1.19 and 0.85 in the comprehensiveness domain, 1.00 and 0.83 in the coordination domain, 1.54 and 1.31 in the family/community orientation, and 1.24 and 0.99 as an average of 3 domains above. The scores in the comprehensiveness domain and the average of 3 domains were significantly higher in the primary than in the nonprimary care physician group.ConclusionPrimary care physicians showed superior performance compared to non-primary care physicians in comprehensiveness domain and in the average of comprehensiveness, coordination, and family/community orientation domains.

We quantify a class of commonly-employed general equilibrium models of international trade and pricing-to-market that feature firm-level heterogeneity and consumers with nonhomothetic preferences. We demonstrate theoretically that the models lack the flexibility to match salient features of US firm-level data. Consequently, we outline a theoretical framework that can reconcile the documented price dispersion across firms and markets, while maintaining consistency with cross-sectional observations on firm productivity and sales. We calibrate the model's parameters to match bilateral trade flows across 71 countries as well as the productivity and sales advantages of US exporters over non-exporters. We find that the calibrated model accounts for the majority of the dispersion in prices of tradables across countries of different income levels, while maintaining a tight quantitative fit to firm-level data. Given its additional flexibility, the model quantitatively outperforms the existing alternatives and yields welfare gains for the US that are 14-54% higher, but at the cost of loss of tractability.

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