Small business no longer has to mean small benefits

The Internet has drastically changed the benefits environment for small businesses. Formerly, employers with a small workforce were severely limited in providing benefits to their employees. Today, by utilizing the Web, many owners of small businesses are offering their employees benefit packages comparable to those offered at major corporations. This author offers suggestions for effective benefit shopping on the Internet.     

Medical savings accounts (MSAs)--big benefits for small business

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed by Congress last year, implemented a four-year pilot project that allows employees of small businesses to set up tax-free interest-bearing medical savings accounts. These accounts offer advantages for both employees and employers     

Fringe benefits and small businesses: evidence from the federal reserve board small business survey

Data from the 1993 National Survey of Small Businesses (NSSBF) is used to analyse the factors affecting the provision of pensions and health insurance by small businesses. The race of the business owner is found to impact the provision of taxadvantaged fringe benefits, even after accounting for a wide range of other economic and demographic variables. It is not possible to determine why owner race impacts the provision of fringe benefits by small businesses but the significance of the race variable might reflect a lower level of marketing effort by financial service firms in minority-dominated communities. The owner education variable, which is also significant in both the pension and health insurance models, could also be a proxy for the availability of general information about the importance of fringe benefits. With the exception of the sole proprietorship variable, the demographic and economic variables appear to have similar effects on the provision of both pensions and health insurance by small businesses. Some sole proprietors appear to prefer pension benefits to health insurance benefits possibly because pensions allow the business owner to shield some assets in the case of bankruptcy.     

Developing an effective business plan

The cost-consciousness of today's health care industry demands that nurses function as business people as well as care givers. One critical business skill that nurses must develop is writing effective business plans. This article describes a framework for developing successful business plans for both beginning new services and expanding current nursing programs.     

Making a big group feel small

Can a good-sized, well-established group reinvent itself? Recognizing a need for greater efficiency and more satisfied patients, this multispecialty clinic did.     

Worldwide business trends create new leverage for voluntary benefits

The recent growth of interest in voluntary benefits has coincided with a decline in resources available to administer benefit programs. Fortunately, technology offers employers a solution to this resources dilemma in the form of portals, which allow employers to provide choice and access to voluntary benefits without concerns about increasing the workload for the benefits staff and without causing confusion among employees.     

The big problem of forecasting small change

The United States Mint recently reviewed approaches to forecasting the demand for new coin. This paper reports on methods used to determine fundamental attributes of the data, and uses these to help better determine appropriate model specification in order to better plan coin production. In particular, the debate regarding trend versus difference stationarity in macroeconomic trending data is considered. The interest in the present paper is limited to applying a well known unit root test procedure to an untested macrodata set – changes in US Coin demand – to see whether the test is useful in guiding the specification to improved forecast performance. It is found that the forecast results are somewhat sensitive to the way in which the data are seasonally adjusted, and lessons learned from this ‘case study’ indicate that unit root tests are useful in guiding model specification.     

State mandated benefits and the small firm's decision to offer insurance

In the last decade, the number of Americans without health insurance has grown, partly due to an erosion in employer-based coverage among workers. This paper examines the extent to which state-mandated benefit requirements and other state insurance regulations discourage small firms in the private sector from providing health benefits. Using data on 1320 firms observed in 1985 and 492 firms observed in 1988, we estimate two models of small firms' decisions to offer health insurance (one for each data set), and then use them to assess the effects that mandates had on purchasing decisions in both years. We estimate that 19 percent of noncoverage among sample businesses in 1985 and 43 percent of noncoverage in the 1988 sample was attributable to state-mandated benefits. State continuation-of-coverage requirements were particularly burdensome for firms. With continued growth in the number of state mandated benefit requirements, we should expect a steady rise in the small firm's propensity to forgo insurance coverage.     

The methodology used by Russian statistical bodies to analyse small business

Assessing the level of development of small business in Russia requires a critical analysis of official statistics, owing to the existence of several inconsistencies. In addition, the frequent changes in the methodology make it difficult to compare the data over a period. It must also be taken into account that Russian and Western official data on small business are not fully comparable, as the Russian definition of small business has several limitations. For this reason its contribution to the economy is understated. Officially, employment in small businesses has stopped growing since 1994. Survey‐based results, however, point to a continuous increase in the number of people employed by new private enterprises, suggesting that the emergence of entrepreneurship has been an organic process, as in the leading transition countries, although it has been much slower in Russia.     

Information technology in business process reengineering

Today's environment is characterized by increasing levels of competition. Enterprises wanting to increase their market share or obtain profits must adapt to changes in the environment. Consequently, many changes in business methods are beginning to appear. One of them is business process reengineering (BPR), defined as the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance. Among the potential enablers of BPR is information technology (IT). IT makes it possible to obtain improvements in BPR, though not just by itself. This paper will demonstrate the importance of IT in one of the most prominent methodologies. Enterprises can make their tasks easier, redesign their organization, change the way they work, and achieve spectacular improvement using, among other enablers, IT. This paper was presented at the Forty-Seventh International Atlantic Economic Conference in Vienna, Austria, March 16–23, 1999.