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States have considerable flexibility in determining Medicaid policies such as financial eligibility criteria, subsidies for home-and community-based services, and reimbursements rates to skilled nursing facilities, among other things. An understanding of how differences in Medicaid programs across states and time affect the elderlys' demand for Medicaid coverage of long-term care is necessary for evaluating future changes in the Medicaid program structure. We use data from the 1993, 1995, 1998, and 2000 waves of the Asset and Health Dynamics of the Elderly and variation in state Medicaid policies over time to estimate our dynamic framework capturing the sequential asset and gift decisions that determine eligibility for Medicaid. We also model the long-term care decisions of married and single individuals conditional on endogenous insurance coverage and health transitions. To control for the impact of unobserved heterogeneity in all outcomes, the structural equations of the empirical model are estimated jointly, allowing for correlation in the error structure across equations and over time. In this paper we focus on the asset and gifting decisions of the elderly over time. We find that many of the Medicaid policy variables that differ across states have a significant but small effect on the savings decisions of the elderly, with single elderly individuals exhibiting more response than married elderly individuals. Louisiana has the lowest and New York, the highest cost. 2 Very few employer-provided health insurance plans cover long-term care. Although private LTC insurance policies exist, they are very expensive and held by few elderly individuals.

Adverse health outcomes for uninsured patients have been attributed to their health status and to the quality of treatment received. A question about treatment that remains unexplored is whether physicians treating the uninsured are more likely to have characteristics indicative of lower quality than physicians treating insured patients. Using education, training, experience, and board certification to measure physician quality, we find that uninsured and Medicaid patients are treated by lower-quality physicians both because of the hospitals these patients attend and because of sorting within hospitals. The effects are statistically significant, but small.

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The level of investment in information communication technologies (ICT) that may affect Business and Economic Research ISSN 2162-4860 2017 http://ber.macrothink.org 262 stock market capitalization varies substantially across countries. Using data on 81 countries from 1998 to 2014, we use a country-fixed effects model to estimate the relationship between ICTs and stock market capitalization. Our empirical model is built on the premise that (1) increased deployment of ICT allows financial market participants to make more informed decisions at reduced inherent risks associated with deficient information or uncertainty in financial markets; and (2) increased access to and use of information communication technologies is expected to improve a country's economic fundamentals. The empirical results support our hypothesis that ICT expansions are positively associated with stock market capitalization.