The economic burden of depression among adults with rheumatoid arthritis in the United States

Aims: Depression is the most frequent comorbidity reported among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Comorbid depression negatively impacts RA patients’ health-related quality-of-life, physical function, mental function, mortality, and experience of pain and symptom severity. The objective of this study was to assess healthcare utilization, expenditures, and work productivity among patients with RA with or without depression.

Materials and methods: Data from adult patients who had at least two visits each related to RA and depression over a 1-year period were extracted from the Truven Health MarketScan research databases. Outcomes comprised healthcare resource utilization, work productivity loss, and direct healthcare costs comparing patients with RA with depression (n?=?3,478) vs patients with RA without depression (n?=?43,222).

Results: Patients with RA and depression had a significantly greater relative risk of hospitalization and number of all-cause and RA-related hospitalizations, utilization of emergency services, days spent in the hospital, physician visits, and RA-related surgeries compared with RA patients without depression. Patients with RA and depression had a higher risk of and experienced more events and days of short-term disability compared with patients without depression. The incremental adjusted annual all-cause and RA-related direct costs were $8,488 (95% CI = $6,793–$10,223) and $578 (95% CI = –$98–$1,243), respectively, when comparing patients with RA and depression vs RA only.

Limitations: The current analysis is subject to the known limitations of retrospective studies based on administrative claims data.

Conclusions: This study suggested increased healthcare utilization, work productivity loss, and economic burden among RA patients due to comorbid depression. These findings emphasize the importance of managing depression and including depression as a factor when devising treatment algorithms for patients with RA.     

Operational risk quantified with spectral risk measures: a refined closed-form approximation

The quantification of operational risk has become an important issue as a result of the new capital charges required by the Basel Capital Accord (Basel II) to cover the potential losses of this type of risk. In this paper, we investigate second-order approximation of operational risk quantified with spectral risk measures (OpSRMs) within the theory of second-order regular variation (2RV) and second-order subexponentiality. The result shows that asymptotically two cases (the fast convergence case and the slow convergence) arise depending on the range of the second-order parameter. We also show that the second-order approximation under 2RV is asymptotically equivalent to the slow convergence case. A number of Monte Carlo simulations for a range of empirically relevant frequency and severity distributions are employed to illustrate the performance of our second-order results. The simulation results indicate that our second-order approximations tend to reduce the estimation errors to a great degree, especially for the fast convergence case, and are able to capture the sub-extremal behavior of OpSRMs better than the first-order approximation. Our asymptotic results have implications for the regulation of financial institutions, and may provide further insights into the measurement and management of operational risk.     

近10年日本宏观经济的理论分析与展望

近10年日本经济停滞不前，一方面对外经济状况不佳：日元对美元汇率技术下跌。且不断加剧；出口增长放缓，贸易顺差连续下滑，另一方面国内宏观经济状况严峻；失业率不断上升，内需不振；通货紧缩逐步加深；工业增长持续低迷，工业生产与效益下降，究其原因，用内外均衡模型理论分析得出，日本经济没有达到均衡的0点，内外均衡遭到了破坏，而展望今后的日本经济和日元走势，基于日本财政状况的恶化及货币政策的失效，估计还不会导致资本的大量外流。也不会对资本流动产生重要的影响，而结构改革也将可能引致日元升值。     

The application of Operation and Technology Roadmapping to aid Singaporean SMEs identify and select emerging technologies

In order to aid Singaporean SMEs identify and select emerging technologies for business benefit, a modified process of the Cambridge T-Plan methodology has been introduced and applied to a pilot sample of 30 companies in a variety of manufacturing sectors. This fast and simple process takes the company through five key steps to enable them to create their first Operation and Technology Roadmap (OTR). The paper explains the background to the approach and focuses on the initial benefits identified by a survey of the pilot companies.     

对我国上市银行非经常性损益披露的分析和建议

本文通过分析2001至2004年上市银行年报非经常性损益的披露状况,对照监管部门法规,发现存在披露不充分的现象,对非经常性损益的确认也有理解偏颇,由此造成很多重大的可疑事项未计入非经常性损益。本文认为这对银行利润的真实性产生一定的影响,故建议政策制定者制定更详细的法规来规范披露行为,并就一些特殊事项做出释疑。     

日本循环经济的运作方式及启示

日本是世界上最早探索循环经济发展模式的国家之一,也是循环经济立法最全、资源循环利用率最高的国家。日本发展循环经济是客观资源条件、经济快速增长和实现可持续发展的要求,多年来,在循环经济的实践中取得了很大的成绩,积累了丰富的经验。目前我国已充分认识到发展循环经济的重要性,日本在建立循环型社会方面的运作方式给我们提供了经验和启示。     

Operational Research and the environment

The discipline of Operational Research (OR) is primarily concerned with improving the effectiveness and efficiency of decision processes. These processes take place everywhere in society: industry, banking, agriculture, government, politics. Frequent use of mathematical optimization models is typical of OR. Since the early '80s these models are increasingly packaged in a user-friendly way, as Decision Support Systems. In the following we will illustrate how OR can be used to describe and solve a number of environmental problems.     

On estimating the mean of the selected normal population under the LINEX loss function

Following Parsian and Farsipour (1999), we consider the problem of estimating the mean of the selected normal population, from two normal populations with unknown means and common known variance, under the LINEX loss function. Some admissibility results for a subclass of equivariant estimators are derived and a sufficient condition for the inadmissibility of an arbitrary equivariant estimator is provided. As a consequence, several of the estimators proposed by Parsian and Farsipour (1999) are shown to be inadmissible and better estimators are obtained. Received January 2001/Revised May 2002     

违约损失率问题初探

巴塞尔新资本协议强调内部评级法在风险管理和资本监管中的重要作用。内部评级法的关键在于对违约率及其相关因素的测量,其中违约概率(PD)和违约损失率(LGD)是内部评级法的核心变量。对国际上关于LGD的表现及影响因素的讨论进行了总结与分析,并重点对LGD与PD之间的关系进行了介绍。     

利率市场化能降低企业营运风险吗?——基于融资约束和企业金融化的双重视角

如何提高金融服务实体经济的结构性调节功能并促进企业有序运营与健康发展是金融供给侧结构性改革的重要目标。利率市场化改革作为金融领域最重要的改革之一,其在微观层面如何影响实体经济运行引起了高度关注。本文首先从理论上诠释了利率市场化通过缓解融资约束、抑制金融化进而降低企业营运风险的逻辑关系。为识别利率市场化与企业营运风险之间的因果效应,本文以中国人民银行2004年10月取消金融机构贷款利率上限和2013年7月取消金融机构贷款利率下限为外生冲击,基于融资约束差异构造准自然实验为上述理论推断提供经验证据。特别地,利率市场化每增加1单位标准差,企业营运风险平均约下降样本标准差的2.39%。异质性分析表明,利率市场化对企业营运风险的抑制效应在融资约束程度较高、行业竞争程度较高、投资机会较多的企业中尤为明显。本文研究对于进一步优化资源配置效率、实现金融与实体经济高质量发展具有一定参考意义。