Patient intensity in an ambulatory oncology research center: A step forward for the field of ambulatory care--Part II

Nursing leaders in ambulatory care need to objectively quantify patient intensity to balance patient care needs and nursing resources. In this three-part series, current literature on acuity/intensity tools will be reviewed, and the development of an Ambulatory Intensity System (AIS) to objectively quantify nursing care will be described. In this article, the ongoing implementation of the system, its incorporation into the organization's established computerized appointment system, reliability measures, and related performance improvement activities will be discussed.     

Contents of Volume 47

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 47     

Mimicking repurchases

We study the tendency of firms to mimic the repurchase announcements of their industry counterparts. We argue that a firm, by repurchasing its shares, sends a positive signal about itself and a negative one about its competitors. This induces the competing firms to mimic the behavior of the repurchasing firm by repurchasing themselves. Using a broad sample of US firms from the period 1984–2002, we show that, in concentrated industries, a repurchase announcement lowers the stock price of the other firms in the same industry. The other firms react by repurchasing themselves to undo these negative effects. Repurchases are chosen as a strategic reaction to other firms’ repurchase decisions and are not motivated by the desire to time the market, i.e., to take advantage of a significantly undervalued stock price. Therefore, repurchasing firms in more concentrated industries experience a lower increase in value in comparison with their counterparts in less concentrated industries in the post-announcement era. Alternative methodologies used to estimate long-term performance confirm that it is only the repurchasing firms in low concentration industries that outperform the market, their non-repurchasing peers, and their counterparts in more concentrated industries by amounts that are economically and statistically significant.     

Banks and bubbles: How good are bankers at spotting winners?

This paper examines the bank lending relations of a large sample of technology and nontechnology firms that went public during the 1996–2000 period. We use a unique hand-collected data set to examine the characteristics of firms that establish pre- Initial Public Offering (IPO) bank lending relations and whether post-IPO performance is related to the existence and size of pre-IPO banking relations. We find that the majority of IPO firms have banking relations before they go public. Firms with banking relations are older, more profitable or, in the case of tech firms, have lower losses, and are more likely to have funding from venture capitalists than firms without banking relations. We also find that banks lent aggressively to technology firms in the sense that current earnings and cash flows were significantly less important in determining banking relations for technology firms than for nontechnology firms. Consistent with the importance of so-called soft information in lending decisions, we find that, controlling for ex ante observable risk measures, there is a positive and significant relation between improvements in post-IPO operating performance and the existence and size of pre-IPO banking relations. Overall, our results indicate that firms with the best current and future prospects establish banking relations. Our findings provide an explanation as to why investors could interpret lending relations as a positive signal of firm quality.     

Quality perceptions under evolving information conditions: Implications for diet,health and consumer satisfaction

Consumers’ perception of, and satisfaction with, fruit quality is an important issue for both public policy and commercial reasons. However, because of information problems, consumers cannot easily choose fruits of a quality most likely to satisfy their preferences and health needs. The research reported here employed an experimental auction method to test perceptions of fruit quality by evaluating the willingness to pay (WTP) of consumers for five different varieties of soft citrus under three different information conditions: visual inspection of the fruit before peeling; visual inspection after peeling; and after consumption. Significant differences were found in valuations of the different varieties as consumers gained information. Conclusions are drawn about the value of the methodology and the results themselves, and implications are inferred for policy and for growers and traders. It is argued that product information should be oriented not just towards nutritional education but also towards increasing the pleasure of healthy eating.     

Fiscal Balance and Current Account in Professional Forecasts

This paper investigates the relationship between financial institutions' expectations of the current account and the fiscal balance. Using professional macroeconomic forecasts for the G‐7 countries, we find a positive relationship between forecasts of the cyclically adjusted fiscal balance deficit and forecasts of the current account deficit, indicating that professional forecasts embody links implied by the twin deficits hypothesis. In assessing the relationship between the forecasts of the fiscal deficit and the current account, we find that forecasters correctly make the distinction between the effect of fiscal policy and automatic stabilizers.     

Social Position and Behaviour: A Formalization

Modern society has witnessed anever-increasing development in the social sciences;partly due to changes in mentality, and partly due tothe growing requirements of the economic and political world – requirements which frequently takeon the guise of necessity, as for instance in thecases of market research and electoral opinion polls.Such development has produced an increasing paralleldemand for mathematical accuracy and exactitude inthese fields.The intention here is to rationalize the basic logicand methodology of the sociological procedure; anintention, it is hoped, which could be influential inimproving practical sociological work by rendering itmore comprehensible. This requires the employment offairly sophisticated mathematical and statisticalnotions.Section 1 outlines the definitions considered essential for the rationalization of the basiclogic framework previously described.Section 2 discusses the general concept of statisticalvariance. Section 3 introduces the notion of ``heterogeneity'and offers several propositions linked to this concept.Section 5 revolves around the notion of ``inaccuracy'.Section 6 presents a theorem relating to theimmersion of metric spaces in Banach spaces, andshows how the theorem can be used to constructtheoretically satisfactory immersion algorithms.Section 7 together with the material, which ispreviously introduced in Section 4, outlines thecluster analysis and the principal components methodologies.     

Firms,public good provision and institutional uncertainty: Evidence from Russia

Enterprises in post-socialist and transition economies often participate in providing infrastructure and social services to the surrounding community which in the Russian legal setting should be local authorities’ responsibility. We propose that this bundling of social and infrastructure goods provision with firm's core operations is a fully rational choice in an uncertain institutional environment. A unique survey data suggest that this manifests itself through more reliable infrastructure, stronger employee attachment to the firm and, most interestingly, through better relations with the authorities. Relationship with authorities is a two-way game where the firm gains from the arrangement but on the other faces sanctions if it decided to depart from it. Firm's participation in the arrangement is clearly enhanced by inherited fixed capital assets from the Soviet era.     

Tracking Agricultural Economics Professionals

In 1998, a survey of the American Agricultural Economics Association was conducted by the Committee on Women in Agricultural Economics. The survey was the first in an ongoing tracking system, funded by the American Agricultural Economics Association Foundation, designed to track the progress of agricultural economics professionals over time, examine factors that influence their professional development, and investigate changes over time in the composition of the profession and issues influencing change. This study provides the background and objectives of the tracking system, the survey procedure, and basic demographics of the American Agricultural Economics Association and survey respondents.