Factors influencing organizational participation in the Clinical Nurse Leader project

When the American Association of Colleges of Nursing introduced the Clinical Nurse Leader"s (CNL) pilot project in 2004, it was the first time in more than 40 years that an attempt was made to introduce a new role to the profession. This new role was designed to address many challenges related to patient care in the current health care delivery system including a need for more effective clinical problem solving, better coordination at the point of care, stronger interdisciplinary relationships, and more rapid implementation of evidenced-based practice findings at the patient-provider interface. Critics from both academic and practice settings have questioned the need and wisdom of introducing a new role to the profession at this time. The factors that led some nursing leaders in early stages of this project to be proactive and involve their organizations as early adopters of the CNL role were examined in this study. Five major factors were identified from the research to form a framework designed to explain organizational participation: organizational needs, a desire to improve patient care, an opportunity to redesign care delivery, the promotion of the professional development of nursing staff, and the potential to enhance physician-nurse relationships. The ability of academic and service partners to forge the types of relationships and promote best practices as is occurring in the CNL project may be a critical success factor in confronting the current and impending nursing shortage.     

Factors influencing work productivity and intent to stay in nursing

The researchers document the individual and workplace characteristics associated with decreased work productivity and intent to stay in nursing for nurses employed in direct patient care in the hospital setting. Factors associated with decreased work productivity were age, total years worked as a RN, quality of care provided, job stress score, having had a job injury, and having a health problem. Nurse leaders must place additional efforts on changes needed to improve the hospital workplace environment to decrease job stress, improve RNs' ability to provide quality care, and to assure the health and safety of nurses. Reducing job stress and providing adequate staffing so quality of care can be provided will enhance job satisfaction which will also encourage RNs to stay at the bedside. Improved work environments may delay older RNs' retirement from the workforce.     

Factors influencing the adoption of the internet of things in supply chains

This study investigates the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in supply chains through evolutionary game theory. In the modeling process, the payoff matrices for the game between the core enterprises and the suppliers and the replicator dynamics equations for these two parties are constructed. The punishment mechanism is introduced to prevent the “free-ride” behavior of core enterprises. As the key technology of the IoT, the radio-frequency identification (RFID) implementation strategies of both parties are analyzed on the basis of the replicator dynamics. Both parties eventually achieve evolutionarily stable strategies by adopting the strategies of other participants. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the effects of the parameters on the selection of RFID technology. Results show that the willingness of core enterprises and suppliers to implement RFID can be strengthened by adjusting relevant parameters. Thus, this study could contribute in generalizing the application of the IoT in supply chains.     

中国电影产业国际竞争力水平测算及影响因素分析

经济全球化加深了各国的交流与合作,电影产业国际竞争力的提升不仅有助于推动我国在世界范围内的文化辐射,还能促进我国融入文化产业的全球价值链。文章通过定量测算和定性分析发现,现阶段中国电影产业的国际竞争力依旧处于较弱阶段。虽然巨大的市场潜力和有利的政策环境为中国电影国际化发展带来潜在机遇,然而我国电影的作品质量、人才素质,企业战略,产业链各环节的支撑作用,以及海外市场结构等方面均存在问题,极大地削弱了电影产业的竞争优势。最后提出的政策启示对当前我国优化电影产业国际竞争力、提升文化软实力具有积极的现实意义。     

Threat of grade retention,remedial education and student achievement: evidence from upper secondary schools in Italy

We use a reform in Italy to investigate the effects on academic achievement of more stringent requirements for grade progression at secondary school. Geogr     

农村人力资本高等教育投资的影响因素探析

高等教育阶段,影响农村人力资本投资的因素很多,包括农村居民收入的低水平循环增长、教育机会的不均等、农村家庭高等教育投资与收益的不对称和农村人力资本高等教育收益率较低等。     

Job search and academic achievement

The paper develops a structural model for the labor market behavior of students entering the labor market. We explicitly model the trade-off between devoting effort to studying and to job search. Furthermore, we allow for on-the-job search. The model is estimated using a unique data set of individuals who completed undergraduate education in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2001. Our estimation results show that labor market returns of high grades are low. Wage increases between jobs are explained by labor market friction rather than returns of early work experience. Our results indicate that a 1 percentage point decrease in the unemployment rate increases wage offers on average by 3 percent, but that the amount of job search effort is not very sensitive to business cycle fluctuations. Policy simulations show that study effort and hence academic achievement are much more sensitive to financial incentives than job search effort and labor market outcomes.     

Intra-school competition and student achievement

Within the economics of education literature, numerous studies have investigated the relationship between educational market competition and educational achievement. Educational market competition has been defined as either the availability of vouchers within a community or the number of schools or school districts within the relevant market structure. While these studies have shown that increases in inter-district competition result in increased student achievement, no studies, to our knowledge, have yet investigated the effect of intra-school competition on student achievement. Within this study, a measure of intra-school competition is developed and the findings indicate that increased intra-school competition leads to increased student achievement.     

剖析财务业绩评价的多方动机

财务业绩评价是评价财务状况、衡量经营业绩的重要依据，是挖掘潜力、改进工作、实现理财目标的重要手段，是合理实施投资决策的重要步骤。在评价中主要运用一定的经济分析手段考察被核算单位的盈利能力和偿债能力，分析原因，研究潜力，并提供建设性意见的财务管理活动。通过单位实体财务活动的全面分析，可为上级职能部门、资金授与者、投资者、融资使用者、监督管理者以及其他经济专家、学者、律师、证券机构等部门和人员提供可靠的信息资源，并进行预测、分析与判断，进而掌握单位财务活动的规律性，用以不断改进企业财务管理工作，提高经济效益。     

Equality of opportunity and educational achievement in Portugal

Portugal has one of the highest levels of income inequality in Europe, and low wages and unemployment are concentrated among low skill individuals. Education is an important determinant of inequality. However, there are large differences in the educational attainment of different individuals in the population, and the sources of these differences emerge early in the life-cycle when families play a central role in individual development. We estimate that most of the variance of school achievement at age 15 is explained by family characteristics. Observed school inputs explain very little of adolescent performance. Children from highly educated parents benefit of rich cultural environments in the home and become highly educated adults. Education policy needs to be innovative: (1) it needs to explicitly recognize the fundamental long run role of families on child development; (2) it needs to acknowledge the failure of traditional input based policies.

Factors influencing producers' perceptions about the importance of government support programmes in agriculture: application of a semi-parametric ordered response model

This article examines factors affecting producers’ perceptions towards the relative importance of government support programmes in agriculture. Specific attention is placed on determining the effect of crop insurance usage on farmers’ views about the importance of government programme payments. Results from a semi-parametric ordered response model shows that producers who use yield- or revenue-based crop insurance products also tend to view government programmes with higher importance, suggesting that crop insurance and direct government support programmes tend to be complements rather than substitutes.     

对外反倾销:成效与应对措施

改革开放后的很长一段时期内,受多方面因素影响,中国各个层面均未将外国商品在中国市场的低价销售行为与倾销联系起来,倾销的危害性并未得到重视,更谈不上从法律上加以制止.这使外国商品在华倾销屡屡得逞,并影响了中国相关产业的发展.随着市场经济的发展以及认识的提高,外国在华倾销行为及其危害在近十年来逐步得到重视,部分行业的中国企业已勇敢地拿起了反倾销这一救济武器.     

Industrial actions in schools: strikes and student achievement

Many jurisdictions ban teacher strikes on the assumption that they negatively affect student achievement, but there is surprisingly little research on this question. The majority of existing studies make cross‐section comparisons of the achievement of students who do or do not experience a strike. They conclude that strikes do not have an impact. I present new estimates of this impact of strikes using an empirical strategy that controls for fixed student characteristics at the school cohort level, and a sample of industrial actions by teachers in the province of Ontario. The results indicate that teacher strikes in grades 5 or 6 have a negative, statistically significant impact on test score growth between grade 3 and grade 6. The largest impact is on math scores: 29% of the standard deviation of test scores across school/grade cohorts.     

How accountability pressure on failing schools affects student achievement

Although an emerging body of evidence has shown that the threat of sanctions on low-performing schools can raise student test scores in the short run, the extent to which these test score improvements are due to schools' manipulation of the accountability system has remained uncertain. In this paper, I provide two new strands of evidence to evaluate the relative importance of educational reforms and gaming behavior in generating test score gains by threatened schools. First, using a regression discontinuity design that exploits Florida's system of imposing sanction threats on the basis of a cutoff level of performance, I estimate medium-run effects on student test scores from having attended a threatened elementary school. Threat-induced math improvements from elementary school largely persist at least through the first 1 to 2 years of middle school, while evidence for persistence of reading improvements is less consistent. Second, I analyze the effects of sanction threats on various features of educational production, and I find that sanction threats raise school spending on instructional technology, curricular development, and teacher training. Both strands of evidence are consistent with a predominant role for educational reforms in generating test score gains by threatened schools.     

Schooling,educational achievement,and the Latin American growth puzzle

Latin American economic development has been perceived as a puzzle. The region has trailed most other world regions over the past half century despite relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle, however, can be resolved by considering educational achievement, a direct measure of human capital. We introduce a new, more inclusive achievement measure that comes from splicing regional achievement tests into worldwide tests. In growth regressions, the positive growth effect of educational achievement fully accounts for the poor growth performance of Latin American countries. These results are confirmed in a number of instrumental-variable specifications that exploit plausibly exogenous achievement variation stemming from historical and institutional determinants of educational achievement. Finally, a development accounting analysis finds that, once educational achievement is included, human capital can account for between half and two thirds of the income differences between Latin America and the rest of the world.     

Private returns to education versus education spill-over effects

In this study we test whether education spill-over effects biase private returns to education. We newly investigate for such effects within narrowly defined occupational groups of a given firm using, going thus a step further than earlier studies analysing such effects at employer level or within regions. Using panel data from a Swiss employer-based labour force survey of 1996 we find clear empirical evidence for education spill-over effects on individual wages (2%). This result proved to be robust against an alternative explanation based on imperfect substitution between highly and less educated workers. Consequently, conventionally calculated private returns to education are shown to be biased upwards. This work was undertaken under the TSER program PL980182 for the PuRE project and was supported by the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science. I thank Josef Zweimüller and Rafael Lalive for their valuable suggestions. Any remaining errors are my own.     

Institutional arrangements in educational systems and student achievement: a cross-national analysis

Given the lack of evidence supporting the view that variation in observable educational inputs affect student achievement, many policymakers and researchers have tried to unearth the salient determinants of student learning. To that end, several recent studies have made use of international data on student achievement to assess the role played by institutional arrangements within the educational system. We revisit this literature using the 1999 TIMSS data—covering over 100,000 students from 22 countries—to analyze the association between different institutional arrangements and the distributions of science and math test scores. The results yield a number of interesting conclusions, as well as highlight the gains to analyzing student achievement within a distributional framework.     

Illicit drug use and labour market achievement: evidence from the UK

This study, using data from the British Crime Survey (BCS), examines the effect of drug use on occupational achievement. It starts by attempting to overcome the identification problem that results from the limited set of drug use questions presented in the BCS. Taking this into account, and allowing for the endogeneity of drug use in equations for unemployment and labour market outcomes, that a mild positive association with ‘soft’ drugs and occupational achievement is observed that diminishes with age. This relationship holds for males but not for females. In contrast, it is also found that past use of ‘hard’ drugs significantly increases the likelihood of current unemployment, although it appears to be unrelated to occupational success, conditional on achieving employment.