Since the development of consumption based asset pricing model in the 1980's numerous studies attempted to test the empirical performance of the model. The main feature of the model is its simplicity in explaining dynamic intertemporal asset pricing models. The model's intuition is based on the fundamental pricing equation. This equation relates the opportunity cost of postponing current consumption which is reflected in the loss of marginal utility to expected gains in marginal utility in the future, and therefore the assets are priced such that the losses incurred today should match the gains received later. Assets that payoff high in good times are less valuable than the ones that pay the same amount in bad times. In pricing assets insurance against higher volatility in consumption is the key to understand the model's predictions.
Over the past twenty years, the United States has experienced divergent trends in birth outcomes, with some key indicators improving and others worsening. In that same time, the level of attention that the federal and state governments have focused on publicly sponsored health insurance for pregnant women has fluctuated, with major efforts to expand health insurance coverage and access to prenatal care concentrated in the early years of this period, and considerably less activity in recent years as child health insurance expansions have been in the policy spotlight.
The last two decades have also witnessed major changes within health care delivery and financing systems, with expansion in the use of managed care as well as new family planning initiatives that target low-income women of childbearing age. Given these trends, the March of Dimes asked the Urban Institute, with its partner the National Academy for State Health Policy, to assess the current “state of the art” of state Medicaid program efforts to reach out to and enroll pregnant women into coverage. The results of this assessment are summarized below.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many developing countries have struggled to service their external debts to both commercial banks and industrial countries’ governments. While there is a general consensus on the idea that the adoption of an IMF programme may act as a “green light” for private loans, this paper provides a first test for the existence of an empirical relationship between the adoption of a Fund programme and the concession of a debt rescheduling by private creditors.
In the early 80s Paris Club creditors provided reschedulings for low-income countries on non-concessional terms and on market-related interest rates. In the late eighties (1989-94) the Brady deals addressed commercial bank lending to sovereign debtors (generally middle-income countries) and involved a combination of an IMF agreement and debt-service reduction and rescheduling from commercial banks. In the same period, Paris Club creditors agreed to provide low-income countries with concessional reschedulings, conditional on the adoption of an IMF adjustment programme, under the Toronto (1988), Trinidad (1990), Naples terms (1994) and, more recently, the World Bank and the IMF have implemented the HIPCs Debt Initiative (1996). At the end of the 90s the Fund has been involved in the East Asian financial crisis. It still seems the case that the acceptance of a Fund agreement acts as a signal of the country’s intentions which reassures the market and in turn makes commercial creditors more willing to accord rescheduling of a country’s debt.
