International yield curve comovements: impact of the recent financial crisis

Empirical evidence on international yield comovement is sparse and lacks consensus. Employing a dynamic correlation approach, we show that during the recent global financial crisis, euro area yields have ceased to comove with the yields of the other international markets – Canada, UK and US. Some implications of our results are discussed.     

New light on the longshot bias

The longshot bias is the tendency for bettors to put more money on horses with long odds than is justified by their objective probability of winning: thus favourites win more often than projected by their odds. This challenges normative assumptions as it means the return increases with the probability of winning. Even though the longshot bias is well-known, it has defied authoritative explanation. This article draws on studies of the longshot bias over 50 years across four continents to show that its nature is consistent with two bettor populations. One is risk-averse, knowledgeable about winners, backs favourites, believes in the gambler's fallacy, and has a positive expected return. The other, a larger group is risk loving, backs longshots, believes in hot hands, and has a significant, negative expected return. The crossover between the two groups occurs where the probability of a positive result is about 0.2. This matches the transition from risk aversion to risk embrace which has been found in a variety of behavioural studies.     

Debate: Local government selfimprovement— benchmarking through LG Inform

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of the implementation and outcomes of Practice-Based Commissioning (PBC) in the English National Health Service. Focusing on the local construction of ‘budgets’ and ‘savings’, it reports in detail the issues that arose in the study sites, and discusses the implications for the future development of PBC.     

Medication administration: the implementation process of bar-coding for medication administration to enhance medication safety

Approximately 1.5 million Americans are injured each year because of medication errors. In hospitals alone medication errors cost the health system well over $3.5 billion per year. Nurses are at the frontline of medication administration accountability. A Bar Code Medication Administration application was implemented at a 300-bed community hospital. The creation of the process was spearheaded by a taskforce consisting of staff nurses, nursing and pharmacy administrators, and an IT representative. This group planned the implementation process, which included changes to medication policies and procedures, downtime procedures, workflow designs, planning for nursing training, and changes to medication delivery. The results from the pilot indicated that the bar-cod technology reduced medication errors by 80%.     

Training in the UK: does national ownership matter?

We investigate whether UK-owned and foreign-owned firms operating in the UK differ with respect to the quality and quantity of training they perform. A simple theoretical model sets up the basis for the empirical analysis, which utilises the 1990 WIRS/EMSPS data set. It is found that, whereas the intensity of training does not seem to vary systematically with ownership, foreign-owned establishments train significantly more of their employees and seem to provide higher quality training than their UK-owned counterparts. It also appears that ‘poaching’ of trained labour, which is fairly similar by ownership, is not regarded as a major problem by employers.