Physician practice acquisitions: preparing for the transaction

Hospitals embarking on acquisitions of physician practices should lay the groundwork for these transactions by: Building a framework for consistency. Preparing for possible exceptions to the framework. Broadly assessing the practice before advancing to the thorough valuation of the practice. Being alert for red flags and potential deal breakers and ready to address them.     

Career Identity and its Relation to Career Anchors and Career Satisfaction: The Case of Convention and Exhibition Industry Professionals in Asia

This paper explores career identity and its relation to career anchors and career satisfaction, key demographic and job variables, specific to convention and exhibition (C&E) industry professionals in Asia. It reviews the key literature relating to career identity and career anchors, which is followed by a discussion of findings of an online survey of C&E industry professionals in Asia. Study results indicate that the majority of C&E professionals displayed a strong cognitive and affective identification with their career in the C&E industry. However, career identity varied significantly with the time respondents had been in the industry, job seniority and age. In terms of career anchors, the lifestyle anchor was found to be the most dominant career anchor, followed by challenge and autonomy. Examining the relation between career anchors with career identity revealed that the lifestyle anchor was more important to respondents with a weak career identity, whereas the challenge anchor was more important to respondents with a strong career identity. Managerial implications of the study findings and suggestions for future research are provided.     

Ist der Fahrplan der Energiewende noch einzuhalten?

The German energy transition represents a policy-driven, sustainability-oriented restructuring of both supply- and demand-side components of the entire energy system by 2050. Whereas the development of renewable energies in the electricity sector is right on track, due to the feed-in tariffs of the German Renewable Energy Sources Act, many other crucial requirements for a successful transition are not, amongst others the improvement of energy effi ciency and the decarbonisation of the transport sector. Contrary to the public discussion, the primary future challenges do not consist in limiting electricity prices or abandoning feed-in support schemes, but rather in coordinating the variety of actors as well as appropriately matching the different system elements (grids, technologies, energy sectors, demand and supply side, etc.). Much remains to be done. By highlighting some examples like the need to take into account future implications of climate change for the energy sector, the consequences of the current crisis in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme and the need for a cautious adjustment of the EEG, the paper argues that the major challenges regarding the German energy transition mainly go beyond the current policy-driven and short-term discussion of energy prices. Germany’s pioneering attempt to integrate steadily increasing share of non-dispatchable electricity from renewable sources is challenging the stability of the system. Several characteristics in the current selfregulating system are identifi ed and analysed, which reveal themselves as potential weaknesses or shortcomings in the upcoming system.     

Accounting students access to social media related resources and the risk of tacit social exclusion

ABSTRACT

The use of social media platforms to facilitate teaching and learning requires resources (hardware and Internet access) to enable active student participation. Limited access to these resources may impair students’ learning and, should the students consequently fail to graduate, tacitly contribute to their social exclusion. The results of a survey amongst students at a South African university, identified statistically significant differences relating to hardware and Internet access between more affluent students, and lower income students. Using social media may, therefore, be countering the objective of widening the admissions to universities in South Africa as an attempt to address past exclusionary practices. This study raises awareness with instructors and administrators globally, about the risk of tacit social exclusion, as a result of the tools selected to facilitate learning.     

Helping Disadvantaged Students: Findings from the Thuthuka Programme

Abstract

Drawing on social closure theory, this study achieved a deep understanding of the perceptions and experiences of the first cohort of candidates passing through the Thuthuka support programme. Using semi-structured interviews as part of a qualitative approach, currently prevalent modes of professional closure were considered by taking the backgrounds of these students into account, together with their perceptions of the accounting profession. Their views on whether the Thuthuka programme as an intervention had been successful in removing post-apartheid professional closure were determined by taking into account the Thuthuka students’ readiness to sit for professional examinations and to enter the workplace. The findings of the study suggest features that could be considered in support programmes intended for socio-economically disadvantaged students to facilitate their entry into a restrictive and restricted market.     

The role of exercise during adolescence on adult happiness and mood

The main research question for this paper was: Does exercise during adolescence predict happiness and positive moods in adult life? Data was collected through an online questionnaire (N?=?438). The questionnaire included a measure of happiness (The Subjective Happiness Scale), moods (The Profile of Mood States) and questions on current exercise and exercise during adolescence. Exercise during adolescence was a significant predictor for positive moods, even when controlling for current exercise. There is also a connection between exercise during adolescence and happiness, although it appears to be that exercise during adolescence predicts exercise in adult life, which in turn has a connection to happiness. Exercise was not a significant predictor of negative moods in adulthood.     

Labor Taxation and FDI Decisions in the European Union

This paper uses panel data on bilateral FDI stocks in the European Union to empirically analyze the impact of labor and corporate taxations on FDI decisions. While the effect of corporate taxes on FDI is well documented, the impact of labor taxes on FDI has barely been explored. This is surprising since labor taxation may influence FDI as well; the taxation of labor affects the production cost and the ability to attract and retain productive labor, and thereby it also, ultimately, impacts the return to the investment. By employing a Heckman two-step estimation model, which controls for possible sample selection bias due to many zero bilateral observations, we find that labor taxes do influence FDI decisions.     

Der Wert der Worte – Wie digitale Methoden helfen,Kommunikations- und Wirtschaftswissenschaft zu verknüpfen

The use of digital methods offers a chance to connect communication science with economics. In recent years, a growing body of research in economics has turned its attention to media content, assuming that journalistic coverage contains hitherto neglected information relevant for business cycles or financial market movements. Interestingly, these approaches largely ignore communication science’s established theories and empirical findings. This paper aims at building a bridge between the two disciplines. Its contribution is threefold: a) it provides an overview of the most important approaches in economics that incorporate media content; b) it operationalizes the concept of the “narrative”, as it is used in economics, and distinguishes it from the concept of the “frame”, essential in communication science; c) exemplifying our approach, we present a new Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) based on the topic modeling method Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), that enables us to isolate different factors of economic policy uncertainty contained in media coverage.Economic studies treat journalistic media content as a proxy for sentiment prevalent in society. Typically, they rely on frequency analyses of certain keywords, like “recession” or “inflation”. Even more sophisticated approaches, such as Shiller (2017), who calls for establishing a new branch of “narrative economics”, or Baker et al. (2016), who construct a comprehensive set of media-based indicators, make no or little reference to communication science. This neglect could be discounted as pure ignorance, but this misses the point. Being a predominantly empirical discipline today, economics relies on long time-series of data, that have not been available for media content, a gap rendering the two disciplines largely incompatible.The gap is also reflected in terminology. “Frame” is a major analytical concept in communication science, while the term “narrative” has become in vogue in economics. Although both concepts are closely connected, they are rarely properly distinguished from each other. “Frame” can be considered as a rather static concept that applies during a limited period of time. “Narrative”, in contrast, implies dynamic properties, i.?e., the sorting of events, causes and effects over time, that explain how the current state of the world has come about, as stressed by Tenenboim-Weinblatt et al. (2016).In this paper, we propose a synergetic concept. Following Entman (1993), a media frame contains four elements: a) a problem definition, b) a problem diagnosis, c) a moral judgement, and d) possible remedies. We augment this approach by adding two more elements. According to our definition, a media narrative comprises a frame, or several ones, plus e) one or several protagonists—persons, institutions, or social groupings (nations, classes, etc.)—, whose relationships are (often) antagonistic and may change over time; and f) events, that are chronologically integrated and that are (often) assumed to constitute causal relationships. To put it metaphorically: a frame is to a narrative what a still photo is to a movie. Both are valuable concepts; the still photo shows more details, while the movie provides a contextualization over time.Topic models like LDA are valuable tools for the measurement of media narratives. The probabilistic approach enables researchers to conduct what may be called “macro-content analyses”, an exercise that focuses on average reporting patterns in large text corpora and can be translated into numerical time-series, thereby facilitating compatibility with empirical economics. Based on a topic’s frequency analysis, its top words and top articles, “mean media narratives” can be formulated, that integrate certain events, protagonists and frames.In our case study, we exemplify this concept by applying it to an indicator that is currently popular in economics, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (Baker et al. 2016). The EPU aims at capturing political developments that are exogenous to economic models and therefore unpredictable. Essentially, the indicator is based on the counts of articles containing a set of search words, such as “uncertain”, “economic” as well as institutions like the European Central Bank. Using identical search words as the EPU for Germany, we construct a similar corpus for the years 1994 to 2017. By conducting an LDA-based analysis, we are able to extract additional relevant information from the data. In particular, the evolution of different uncertainty factors and their development over time can be detected.Our Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) contains six relevant news topics that are highly relevant for market developments: central banks, the national government, international politics, the business cycle, companies, and society. While the EPU merely shows how often uncertainty concerning economic policy is mentioned in the media, the UPI also indicates the origins of uncertainty. By grouping the six topics into three analytical categories—governments, markets, and society—we find a distinct break in the time-series. Before the financial crisis of 2008, the perception of uncertainty was rather balanced between the three factors. Since then, however, economic uncertainty has mainly been driven by political actors, most prominently by central banks. The corresponding narratives are a two-chapter story: in the first part, up to 2008, stable financial markets and smoothed business cycles prevailed, making central banking a rather straight-forward task. The second part is characterized by multiple crises, leaving central banks as dominant actors, that intervened with unconventional measures. Thereby, they became stabilizing forces, but at the same time sources of uncertainty with respect to the timing and the impact of these measures.