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.     

Charity registration and reporting: a cross-jurisdictional and theoretical analysis of regulatory impact

Governments increasingly regulate charities to restrict the number of organizations claiming taxation exemptions, reduce charities’ ability to abuse state support, and detect and deter fraud. Public interest theory arguments suggest that regulation could increase philanthropy through enhancing public trust and confidence in charities. Nevertheless, public choice theory argues that regulators seek to maximize political returns, ‘manage’ charity-government relationships, and reduce potential regulatory capture.

We analyse charity regulatory regimes using these two regulatory theories and the relative costs and benefits of different regulatory regimes. Heeding these should reduce regulatory inefficiency and balance accountability and transparency demands against benefits charities receive from regulation.     

Influential factors on Chinese airlines’ profitability and forecasting methods

We establish profit models to predict the performance of airlines in the short term using the quarterly profit data collected on the three largest airlines in China together with additional recent historical data on external influencing factors. In particular, we propose the application of the LASSO estimation method to this problem and we compare its performance with a suite of other more modern state-of-the-art approaches including ridge regression, support vector regression, tree regression and neural networks. It is shown that LASSO generally outperforms the other approaches in this study. We concluded a number of findings on the oil price and other influential factors on Chinese airline profitability.     

The price of fear: Estimating the financial cost of bullying and harassment to the NHS in England

Using a spectrum of measures, this paper estimates some of the financial costs of bullying and harassment to the NHS in England. By means of specific impacts resulting from bullying and harassment to staff health, sickness absence costs to the employer, employee turnover, diminished productivity, sickness presenteeism, compensation, litigation and industrial relations costs, we conservatively estimate bullying and harassment to cost the taxpayer £2.281 billion per annum.     

电改环境下油气管道企业用电成本管控研究

电力体制改革为油气管道企业用电成本管控提供了政策支持。在梳理电力改革政策的基础上,简要介绍了适用于油气管道企业的新电力政策,详细分析了我国油气管道企业存在的基本电费偏高、力调电费偏高、用电类型不合理、用电管理有待完善等用电现状及其根本原因。在上述分析的基础上,提出了选取合适的用电类别、选择合理的电费计费方式降低基本电费、提高功率因数降低力调电费、积极利用直购电政策、健全用电成本管控激励和考核机制等对策建议,以期为油气管道企业用电成本管控提供参考借鉴。     

Aging Workforce,Firm Productivity and Labor Costs in Korea: Are Older Workers Costly to Firms?

Are older workers costly to firms? This study aims to investigate the relationship between an aging workforce on firm productivity and labor costs using a unique Korean firm‐level panel dataset (WPS) covering the period from 2007 to 2011. The primary results show no evidence of a negative relationship between the proportion of older workers and firm productivity, and no significant relationship between the proportion of older workers and labor costs. In addition, the findings of this study implies that failure to account for unobserved firm heterogeneity and endogeneity of changes in age structure biases the results toward finding a correlation between the age structure of workers and firm productivity and labor costs. Consequently, there is a tendency to underestimate the true value of older workers for firms.     

History of microfinance in Bangladesh: A life cycle theory approach

This study aims to conceptualise and document the historical evolution of microfinance in Bangladesh using the life cycle theory (LCT). Based on the LCT nomenclature, the microfinance sector in Bangladesh shows characteristics broadly consistent with the saturation phase (2006–2015) – which potentially has adverse impacts on both microfinance clients and institutions. The maturity phase (1996–2005) of microfinance has corresponded with competition and several innovations (financial and non-financial). However, the saturation phase sees increasing presence of uncoordinated microfinance institutions and expansion of multiple borrowing, as well as commercialisation and ‘mission drift’, which constitute important challenges for the regulatory authority and management of microfinance institutions.     

新会计准则下政府补助会计税务处理及其对研发加计扣除的影响

新会计准则完善了旧会计准则的不足,且对会计税务处理以及财务人员提出了更高要求。为了使企业在之后的发展过程中能更好地处理税务工作,分析新会计准则给企业经营带来的影响十分必要。基于此,文章分析了政府补助的内涵,以此为依据分析与之相关的会计核算和税务处理工作,并以当前的企业案例为依据,总结新会计准则下政府补助的会计税务处理对企业研发加计扣除产生的影响,进而为企业持续长远发展提供有参考价值的建议。