Disease management programs: program intervention, behavior modification, and dosage effect

Disease management programs provide highly personalized self- management support to consumers afflicted with chronic illnesses. Program interventions include the provision of health information, ongoing motivation, and support for behavior change, adherence to pharmacotherapy, development of self-efficacy, and the distribution of self-care tools. Interactions between program and patients are structured and repetitive over time. Consumer behavior change can result in measurable improvements in quality and medical cost savings from postponement or avoidance of preventable complications. We evaluated the impact on cost and quality of a comprehensive Diabetes Disease Management Program (DDMP) across ten US urban markets. A staggered implementation allowed for ten pre–post and five pair-wise comparisons. The DDMP demonstrated significant improvements in six diabetes-related quality indicators, lower cost, and a dose-response with greater than 6 months participation. We conclude that a DDMP improves quality of care and reduce overall medical costs.     

A production/remanufacture model with returns’ subassemblies managed differently

This paper considers a production-remanufacturing inventory model for a single product, where constant demand is satisfied from the inventory of newly produced and remanufactured items. Although the available models in the literature imply that collected used units (or returns) are disassembled for recovery purposes, these models really do not treat them as such. Contrary, the returns are assumed to be recovered as whole units, perhaps, for simplicity. This assumption may not capture the benefits reaped from product recovery programs. This paper addresses this limitation in the literature and assumes that each unit of a used product is collected and disassembled into components, where these components are sorted into subassemblies, which are fed back into the production-remanufacturing process. The returned subassemblies are remanufactured and reassembled to represent a second source of as-good-as-new units of the end-product. For this multi-component inventory problem, the question that needs to be answered is whether, or not, extreme strategies of either pure remanufacturing or pure production are more economical than a mixed strategy (one that combines both strategies). A mathematical model is developed that accounts for the inventories of subassemblies. The results suggested that not accounting for the disassembled components of a product leads to inappropriate inventory decisions that are not environmentally sound.     

Identifying risk issues and research advancements in supply chain risk management

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the research development in supply chain risk management (SCRM), which has shown an increasing global attention in recent years. Literature survey and citation/co-citation analysis are used to fulfil the research task. Literature survey has undertaken a thorough search of articles on selected journals relevant to supply chain operations management. Meanwhile, citation/co-citation analysis uses Web of Sciences database to disclose SCRM development between 1995 and 2009. Both the approaches show similar trends of rising publications over the past 15 years. This review has piloted us to identify and classify the potential risk associated with different flows, namely material, cash and information flows. Consequently, we identify some research gaps. Even though there is a pressing need and awareness of SCRM from industrial aspect, quantitative models in the field are relatively lacking and information flow risk has received less attention. It is also interesting to observe the evolutions and advancements of SCRM discipline. One finding is that the intellectual structure of the field made statistically significant increase during 2000-2005 and evolved from passively reacting to vague general issues of disruptions towards more proactively managing supply chain risk from system perspectives.     

Investment Opportunity Set and Voluntary Disclosure of Prospective Information: A Simultaneous Equations Approach

Abstract:   This paper examines empirically the relationship between the level of disclosure of prospective information and the investment opportunity set for firms in New Zealand. Using a systems (two‐stage least squares) approach that explicitly controls for potential endogeneity between disclosure and IOS, we find that the level of prospective information disclosure is significantly and positively related to IOS in both specifications in our simultaneous analysis. Further, we document that prospective information disclosure is positively related to firm size and new security offerings, and is not related to inside ownership and firm profitability. IOS is positively impacted by a firm's investments in fixed assets and its profitability. Finally, we find that forward looking disclosure levels are positively related to the proportion of outside directors on the board and negatively related to barriers to entry, but these findings are not robust across alternative model specifications.     

Disclosure, Corporate Governance and Foreign Share Ownership on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange

We investigate the association of foreign share ownership with firm‐level disclosure and corporate governance structures in Zimbabwe, a developing country in Southern Africa. Our motivation for the study derives from the literature, which suggests that foreign investors: (1) generally have a preference for companies in which they are well informed and where their investments are more likely to be protected, and (2) avoid companies in developing countries because of weak corporate governance structures and low disclosure. Using data drawn from companies listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, we examine the effect of disclosure and corporate governance on foreign share ownership. We find that disclosure, proportion of non‐executive directors, institutional share ownership and audit committee independence are all positively and significantly associated with foreign share ownership. Our results also demonstrate that market capitalization, return on equity and liquidity ratios are significantly associated with foreign share ownership. These results are consistent with the notion that foreign investors have a preference for companies with effective corporate governance structures, companies with less information asymmetry, as well as companies with healthy cash positions. The results have implications for policy‐makers in developing countries in their endeavour to improve liquidity on stock markets through the participation of foreign investors. The results are also useful to managers in developing countries who are keen to increase the market value of their company, thereby reducing their cost of capital.     

Least squares, preliminary test and Stein-type estimation in general vector AR(p) models

In the general vector autoregressive process AR ( p ), multivariate least square estimation (LSE)/maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of a subset of the parameters is considered when the complementary subset is suspected to be redundant. This may be viewed as a special case of linear constraints of autoregressive parameters. We incorporate this nonsample information in the estimation process and propose preliminary test and Stein-type estimators for the target subset of parameters. Under local alternatives their asymptotic properties are investigated and compared with those of unrestricted and restricted LSE. The dominance picture of the estimators is presented.