Educational innovation: nursing's leadership challenge

Hospitals are increasingly looking for the best graduates, but as this competitive environment increases, little focus is on collaboration and innovation in changing the education system so there will be more "best nurses." In universities today we find numerous barriers to investment in innovation and risk, which hampers the ability to address national workforce needs and compete in a global marketplace. Academic institutions need to become more creative, and begin to look at nursing as a partnership between those who essentially purchase our product and those who develop the product. Nursing leadership needs to collaborate quickly with integration and innovation in developing, improving, and maintaining the skill set of the nursing workforce and assuring competent practitioners from our educational system going forward. We need to share our valuable resources and move out of our silos and begin to look at the big picture, and we need to reach inside and find that creative child that works within us.     

International trade and economic convergence: the credit channel

In this paper, we examine a particular mechanism by which internationaltrade accelerates economic convergence. We develop a model ofgrowth under credit constraints in which international tradeexpands access to credit. We show in numerical simulations thatreasonable values for openness generate convergence rates thatmatch well the empirical estimates. We econometrically investigatea key prediction of the model - that more open economies exhibitgreater debt to output ratios - and find substantial supportin the data for this claim. This remains true even when we controlfor a host of additional factors and conduct robustness checks.