The Incidence of Public Spending on Healthcare: Comparative Evidence from Asia

The article compares the incidence of public healthcare across11 Asian countries and provinces, testing the dominance of healthcareconcentration curves against an equal distribution and Lorenzcurves and across countries. The analysis reveals that the distributionof public healthcare is prorich in most developing countries.That distribution is avoidable, but a propoor incidence is easierto realize at higher national incomes. The experiences of Malaysia,Sri Lanka, and Thailand suggest that increasing the incidenceof propoor healthcare requires limiting the use of user fees,or protecting the poor effectively from them, and building awide network of health facilities. Economic growth may not onlyrelax the government budget constraint on propoor policies butalso increase propoor incidence indirectly by raising richerindividuals' demand for private sector alternatives.     

Learning in Public Organizations in 2010

The theme of this article is the future of learning in public organizations. It outlines a way of thinking that might underpin learning, and argues that, by the year 2010, public organizations could develop a radical approach to organizational learning that would make the concept more meaningful in their everyday practice. This approach is based on various shifts in the ways in which management is thought about and enacted. These changes are a movement away from the idea of 'the public manager' to a more relational notion: 'management in public'. The author explains what 'management in public' means, and discusses how it can be put into practice in order to transform learning in public organizations.     

兵装集团“四注重”

兵装集团形成“注重环境建设、注重规划指导、注重方法选择、注重业务实践”的“四注重”方法,堪称管理会计界的实践“标杆”。     

Facing the Age Wave and Economic Policy: Fixing Public Pension Systems with Healthcare in the Wings*

There are two overriding problems faced by ageing societies. One is the financing of public pension (social security in US terms) programmes. The other is paying for healthcare. This paper considers the healthcare issue briefly, emphasising that the issue arises primarily because of advances in medical technology. Better medical technology will improve healthcare in the future, but more advanced technologies also cost more. The focus of the rest of the paper is on the public pension problem. The emphasis is on the early retirement incentives inherent in the provisions of most public pension programmes around the world, the reduction in the labour force participation of older people caused by these incentives, and the large fiscal implication of the inducement of older people to leave the labour force. These results are based on the Gruber–Wise ongoing international social security comparison project.     

Benchmarking macroprudential policies: An initial assessment

In recognition of the severe consequences of the recent international financial crisis, the topic of macroprudential policy has elicited considerable research effort. The present study constructs, for 46 economies around the globe, an index of the capacity to deploy macroprudential policies. Building on elements that have been the subject of recent research, we develop an index that aims to represent the essence of what constitutes a macroprudential regime. Specifically, the index quantifies: (1) how existing macroprudential frameworks are organized; and (2) how far a particular jurisdiction is from reaching the goals established by the Group of Twenty (G20) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB). The latter is a benchmark that has not been considered in the burgeoning literature that seeks to quantify the role of macroprudential policies.     

医保起付线对医疗服务利用和医疗费用的影响

本文针对医保起付线政策的作用机制,采用起付线变化的外生政策实验,利用断点回归方法,评估了降低门诊起付线对医疗服务利用和医疗费用的影响.研究发现,降低起付线使患者面对的平均医疗价格下降,医保报销费用显著增加,对于本文涉及的特定政策和样本而言,起付线下降1％,患者平均的医保基金支出增加约为2％,说明医保基金支出对于起付线变化的弹性可能比较大.但起付线政策对于健康需求程度不同的参保人有不同的影响,降低起付线对医疗费用处于较低和较高水平患者的年度医疗支出影响不明显,对于医疗费用处于中间水平且数量占比较大的患者群体有显著影响.此外,研究结果还表明,起付线一方面具有很强的控费作用,另一方面也能促进健康需求较低的参保人选择基层医疗服务.本文的研究发现对于设计和完善门诊统筹报销政策具有一定的政策含义.     

Great Expectations: Benchmarking for Best Value

Many local authorities have embarked on benchmarking as one way of satisfying the Government's requirement that local authorities provide 'best value' services. This article suggests that the Government's initial enthusiasm for benchmarking was based on an incomplete understanding of the previous experiences of benchmarking in the local government sector. The most recent pronouncements make little mention of benchmarking, but there has been no explicit statement that it is no longer a key feature of best value. Local authorities are investing in developing benchmarking technology that may well fail to pay back in terms of meeting best value stipulations or in satisfying the authorities' own internal management needs. The authors suggest how local authority benchmarking efforts might be redirected to better effect.     

Benchmarking private equity: The direct alpha method

We propose a simple and intuitive measure of the annualized excess return of investments in private equity (PE) funds, as well as in similar vehicles that hold hard-to-value assets. Our ‘Direct Alpha’ method is well-founded in theory and dominates the existing approaches to convert fund lifetime returns into inputs amenable for portfolio-wide optimization. Existing Public Market Equivalent (PME) approaches are either heuristic or involve significant approximation errors. Using real-world PE fund cash flow data, we juxtapose Direct Alpha against nearly all PME methods that have been in broad use.     

Benchmarking in two price financial markets

No arbitrage for two price economies with no locally risk free asset implies that suitably benchmarked prices are nonlinear martingales. However, both the benchmarking asset and the measure change depend on the process being benchmarked. Further assumptions allow the nonlinear martingales in discrete time to become expectations with respect to a nonadditivity probability. Such nonlinear expectations are imminently reasonable given the lack of experience with tail events on both sides of the gain loss spectrum. Continuous time extensions employ measure distortions. The general valuation of economic activities and the leveraging of stability in benchmarked price processes is then addressed. Traditional asset pricing questions and investigations are then reopened for benchmarked prices. In particular, the analytics for benchmarked option pricing and the asset pricing theory for benchmarked prices in a limiting stationary state are developed.     

Going Public without Governance: Managerial Reputation Effects

This paper addresses the agency problem between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders. This problem is common among public firms in many countries where the legal system does not effectively protect minority shareholders against oppression by controlling shareholders. We show that even without any explicit corporate governance mechanisms protecting minority shareholders, controlling shareholders can implicitly commit not to expropriate them. Stock prices of such companies are significantly higher and firms are more likely go public because of this reputation effect. Moreover, insiders divest shares gradually over time, at a rate that is negatively related to the degree of moral hazard.     

Greenhouse Gas Disclosure and Emissions Benchmarking

I examine the effects of the U.S. Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Reporting Program, which requires thousands of industrial facilities to measure and report their GHG emissions. I show that facilities reduce their GHG emissions by 7.9% following the disclosure of emissions data. The evidence indicates that benchmarking—whereby facilities use the disclosures of their peers to assess their own relative GHG performance—spurs emission reductions. Firms' concerns about future legislation appear to motivate this behavior and measurement alone (without disclosure) seems not to reduce emissions. My study highlights how mandatory GHG disclosure can create real effects for peers.     

Diversification as a Public Good: Community Effects in Portfolio Choice

Within a rational general equilibrium model in which agents care only about personal consumption, we consider a setting in which, due to borrowing constraints, individuals endowed with local resources underparticipate in financial markets. As a result, investors compete for local resources through their portfolio choices. Even with complete financial markets and no aggregate risk, agents may herd into risky portfolios. This yields a Pareto‐dominated outcome as agents introduce “community” risk unrelated to fundamentals. Moreover, if some agents are behaviorally biased, or cannot completely diversify their holdings, rational agents may choose more extreme portfolios and amplify the effect.     

Benchmarking in the Dutch Waste-Water Treatment Sector

The Dutch water boards have recently completed a performance measurement and evaluation project for waste-water treatment. This project was intended to strengthen the boards’ accountability to their stakeholders and to identify starting points for performance improvement. The Balanced Scorecard was used as a framework to develop a broad set of performance indicators. This article describes the benchmarking project and how the Dutch water boards intend to use the results to improve performance. Finally, the Dutch project is compared with the UK’s Best Value project.     

Benchmarking in the Dutch Waste-Water Treatment Sector

The Dutch water boards have recently completed a performance measurement and evaluation project for waste-water treatment. This project was intended to strengthen the boards' accountability to their stakeholders and to identify starting points for performance improvement. The Balanced Scorecard was used as a framework to develop a broad set of performance indicators. This article describes the benchmarking project and how the Dutch water boards intend to use the results to improve performance. Finally, the Dutch project is compared with the UK's Best Value project.     

Financial Policy in Practice: Benchmarking Financial Sector Strategies Around the World

Policy makers use financial sector strategies to formulate a holistic policy for the national financial system. This article examines and rates financial sector strategies around the world on how well they formulate development targets, arrangements for systemic risk management, and implementing plans. The strategies are also rated on whether they consider policy trade-offs between financial development and systemic risk management. The rated strategies are then benchmarked against a range of country characteristics. The analysis finds that the scope and quality of national strategies for the financial sector are systematically influenced by several country characteristics. Interestingly, policy trade-offs, particularly between financial development and systemic risk management, are not adequately considered in the strategies.     

浅谈教学中的学习成效评价

学习成效评价是对学生个体学习的进展和行为变化的评价。在教学实践中,教师要善于运用多种学习成效评价的方法来促进学生学习。     

Underwriter Reputation and Initial Public Offers: The Detrimental Effects of Flippers

In this research, we examine the relationship between the reputation of investment banks and the investor clientele to whom they market initial public offers. We hypothesize that the most reputable investment banks have considerable distribution power but confine initial public offer sales to investors with long-term horizons in an effort to maintain prestige. Using the level of relative after-market trading volume to proxy for investor type, we find that as underwriter reputation increases investors with short-term trading horizons (“flippers”) tend to dominate the offerings over the lower prestige levels. For underwriters in the upper reputation tier, however, this dominance begins to decline with increasing reputation. In addition, we find a negative relation between the after-market price performance of the initial public offer firm and the first week's trading volume. The results suggest that flippers can be detrimental to the performance of initial public offer firms. While distributing power may be essential for the maintenance of the reputation of investment banks, the type of investor clientele also appears to be of major importance.     

日本非上市公众公司监管经验与借鉴

日本金融商品交易法实施后,对非上市公众公司的监管规定更加清晰明确。日本通过对股份公司向50名以上的一般投资者发行或转让股票且金额超过1亿日元的行为,以及最近5年内达到资本金5亿日元及1000名以上股东人数的公司纳入监管等规定,来实施对1000家非上市公众公司的监管。日本的相关做法对我国探索建立非上市公众公司适度监管制度具有借鉴意义。     

Learning from Coworkers: Peer Effects on Individual Investment Decisions

Using unique data on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs), we examine the influence of networks on investment decisions. Comparing employees within a firm during the same election window with metro area fixed effects, we find that the choices of coworkers in the firm's ESPP exert a significant influence on employees’ own decisions to participate and trade. Moreover, we find that the presence of high-information employees magnifies the effects of peer networks. Given participation in an ESPP is value-maximizing, our analysis suggests the potential of networks and targeted investor education to improve financial decision-making.     

Benchmarking benchmarks: measuring characteristic selectivity using portfolio holdings data

This study proposes methodological adjustments to the widely adopted performance benchmarking methodology of Daniel et al. (1997 ) as a means of improving the precision of alpha measurement for active equity fund managers. We achieve this by considering the monthly updating of characteristic benchmarks and to ensure neutrality to the Standard & Poor's/Australian Stock Exchange 300 index. Applying this benchmark to a representative sample of active Australian equity funds and simulated passive portfolios that mimic fund manager‐style characteristics, we find statistically different and lower tracking error compared with using the standard characteristic benchmark methodology. We also find evidence that the modified benchmark statistically infers an alpha closer to zero compared with the standard benchmark methodology. Our findings suggest that improved specifications of characteristic benchmarks represent better methods in quantifying fund manager skill.