Comparing Compliance Behaviour of Students and Farmers. An Extra-laboratory Experiment in the Context of Agri-environmental Nudges in Germany

Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on-going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.     

改造我们的教学

进入"双高时代",我们距离新时代高等职业教育"舞龙头"的教学还有问题和"短板",应该改造教学方法和学习与研究制度。在剖析改造教学原因的基础上,厘清看待教学中存在问题的两种互相对立的态度,提出改造教学的革故鼎新路径,如强化"课堂教学为王"的意识,强化学习与专业研究,强化教学的职业素养,强化教师的课堂教学治理。     

道德风险视域下职业经理人信用评价体系构建及测度：以重庆市为例

道德风险总是困扰着职业经理人群体，对企业发展产生不利影响。在实践中，作为建立健全社会信用体系的重要环节，职业经理人信用评价是防范职业经理人群体道德风险的基本思路和必要举措。本文基于马克思主义的理论启示，探索职业经理人三个维度的道德关系和道德风险，并围绕三个维度指向的个人信用、职业信用与职务信用等具体信用构成，阐述职业经理人信用评价内涵。进而，结合职业经理人信用评价内涵，构建系统应对道德风险的职业经理人信用评价体系，并以重庆为例进行实证测度。在此基础上，提出促进职业经理人道德意识与信用水平提升、实现新时代职业经理人群体高素质发展的对策建议。     

Evidence of a glass ceiling for arts and culture professionals in Korea

Using the five available waves of the Wage Structure Survey data, this study employs quantile decomposition to investigate the existence of a glass ceiling among Korean professionals. The decomposition results for all professional workers show an inverse U-shape, which implies no evidence of a glass ceiling. However, we find a monotonically increasing pattern for arts and culture professionals, indicating strong evidence of a glass ceiling on their labour market. This result implies that, as the wage quantile moves from lower to higher levels, female professionals in arts and culture jobs face significant barriers to career advancement. This analysis supports the recent assertion of UNESCO that gender equality in culture is not immune to inequalities and discrimination.     

Can professional skepticism be learned? Evidence from China

The purpose of the present study was to explore whether professional skepticism can be learned in a classroom setting, an issue that has received scant attention in the prior literature. A questionnaire was administered to students enrolled either in the accounting program or in the business administration program of a large college in China. The author finds that participation in ethics education is positively related to students’ professional skepticism, whereas participation in auditing education is not related to accounting students’ professional skepticism. The author also finds that accounting and nonaccounting business students exhibit no significant difference in their scores of professional skepticism.     

Discretionary technology bootlegging tensions in institutional healthcare work

We explore individuals who take some of their technology use ‘underground’, described as ‘bootlegging’, to enhance healthcare work. We find that healthcare professionals’ informal use of mobile applications in healthcare work sometimes ‘sticks out’ and this produces professional identity tensions: (1) conflict with perceptions of professional behaviour, and (2) defilement of expert judgment. Our analysis, moreover, reveals that identity work (i.e. ‘accepting’ and ‘sensemaking’) provides a coping mechanism to deal with these unresolved professional identity tensions. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the constitutive entanglements and two‐way interactions of discretionary technology bootlegging, professional identity and autonomy in institutional healthcare work.     

What do professional forecasters actually predict?

This paper studies what professional forecasters predict. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into trend, business cycle, and irregular components. We examine which components are captured by professional forecasters by regressing their forecasts on the estimated components extracted from both the spectral analysis and the state space model. For both decomposition methods, we find that, in the short run, the Survey of Professional Forecasters can predict almost all of the variation in the time series due to the trend and the business cycle, but that the forecasts contain little or no significant information about the variation in the irregular component.     

Forecasting GDP growth with NIPA aggregates: In search of core GDP

In addition to GDP, which is measured using expenditure data, the U.S. national income and product accounts (NIPAs) provide a variety of measures of economic activity, including gross domestic income and other aggregates that exclude one or more of the components that make up GDP. Similarly to the way in which economists have attempted to use core inflation—which excludes volatile energy and food prices—to predict headline inflation, the omission of GDP components may be useful in extracting a signal as to where GDP is going. We investigate the extent to which these NIPA aggregates constitute “core GDP.” In an out-of-sample forecasting exercise using a novel real-time dataset of NIPA aggregates, we find that consumption growth and the growth of GDP excluding inventories and trade have historically outperformed a canonical univariate benchmark for forecasting GDP growth, suggesting that these are promising measures of core GDP growth.     

Clinical and economic benefits of professional CGM among people with type 2 diabetes in the United States: analysis of claims and lab data

Background: It is estimated that one in 10 people in the US have a diagnosis of diabetes. Type 2 diabetes accounts for 95% of all cases in the US, with annual costs estimated to be $246 billion per year. This study investigated the impact of a glucose-measuring intervention to the burden of type 2 diabetes.

Objective: This analysis seeks to understand how professional continuous glucose monitoring (professional CGM) impacts clinical and economic outcomes when compared to patients who are not prescribed professional CGM.

Methods: This study utilized a large healthcare claims and lab dataset from the US, and identified a cohort of patients who were prescribed professional CGM as identified by CPT codes 95250 and 95251. It calculated economic and clinical outcomes 1 year before and 1 year after the use of professional CGM, using a generalized linear model.

Results: Patients who utilized professional CGM saw an improvement in hemoglobin A1C. The “difference-in-difference” calculation for A1C was shown to be –0.44%. There was no statistically significant difference in growth of total annual costs for people who used professional CGM compared to those who did not ($1,270, p?=?.08). Patients using professional CGM more than once per year had a –$3,376 difference in the growth of total costs (p?=?.05). Patients who used professional CGM while changing their diabetes treatment regimen also had a difference of –$3,327 in growth of total costs (p?=?.0023).

Conclusion: Significant clinical benefits were observed for patients who used professional CGM. Economic benefits were observed for patients who utilized professional CGM more than once within a 1-year period or who used it during a change of diabetes therapy. This suggests that professional CGM may help decrease rising trends in healthcare costs for people with type 2 diabetes, while also improving clinical outcomes.