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What happens to the proposals generated by participatory processes? One of the key aspects of research on public participation that has been the subject of rare systematic analysis and comparison is the fate of the output from participatory processes: their proposals. Which specific factors explain whether proposals are accepted, rejected or transformed by public authorities? This paper contributes to this gap in our understanding in two steps. First, we identify contextual, process and proposal related factors that are likely to affect the prospect of proposals being implemented, generating a set of testable hypotheses. Second, we test the explanatory power of these hypotheses through multilevel analysis on a diverse set of 571 policy proposals. Our findings offer evidence that while there is no effect for contextual factors, both process and proposal related variables have significant explanatory power. The design of participatory processes affects the degree of implementation, with participatory budgeting and higher quality processes being particularly effective. But most significant for explaining implementation are proposal level economic and political factors: a proposal's cost, the extent to which it challenges existing policy and the degree of support it has within the municipality all strongly affect the chance of implementation.

How does the deregulation of medicine influence access to drugs? This paper provides an economic policy assessment of the effects of medicine deregulation drawing on the Peruvian experience between 1991 and 2006. As in other low-income countries, health insurance development is inadequate, drug expenditure is mostly paid out-of-pocket and approximately one third of the Peruvian population has limited access to ‘essential medicines’. Market deregulation in this context can exert an impact on prices and hence reduce access to medicines. Based on this evidence, we find that product and price deregulation of the medicines market appears to have reduced consumer trust of locally produced medicines, which in turn incentivised a switch to branded and more expensive drugs. The latter resulted in a further decreased access to medicines.

Long-term care (LTC) is the largest insurable risk that old-age individuals face in most western societies. However, the demand for LTC insurance is still ostensibly small in comparison to the financial risk. One explanation that has received limited support is that expectations of either ‘public sector funding’ and ‘family support’ crowd out individual incentives to seek insurance. This paper aims to investigate further the above mentioned motivational crowding out hypothesis by developing a theoretical model and by drawing on an innovative empirical analysis of representative European survey data containing records on individual expectations of LTC funding sources (including private insurance, social insurance and the family). The theoretical model predicts that, when informal care is treated as exogenously determined, expectations of both state support and informal care can potentially crowd out LTC insurance expectations, while this is not necessarily the case when informal care is endogenous to insurance, as happens when intra-family moral hazard is integrated in the insurance decision. Evidence from expectations data suggest evidence consistent with the presence of family crowding out, but no evidence of public sector crowding out, except for the cohort of individuals older than 55.

Social identity has become accepted as a key concept underpinning the endogeneity of economic behaviour and preferences. It is important in explaining attitudes towards redistribution and pro-social behaviour. We examine how economic theory measures social identity and its effects on preferences towards redistribution, social solidarity and redistributive institutions. Empirical evidence indicates that social identity carries weight in explaining the presence of social preferences and attitudes towards redistributive institutions.