Chronic pain and pain disability: The next frontier for healthy and effective organizations

Although managers may not be aware of it, research suggests that 20%-30% of employees may be working while experiencing chronic pain. In this article, we review what is known about chronic pain and how it is experienced in the workplace. We argue that chronic pain is an issue that organizations need to deal with and we make specific recommendations for doing so.     

Specialty products: the next challenge for alliances

As group purchasing matures, alliances and GPOs will need to expand their contract portfolio to include specialty products. As groups and manufacturers negotiate successful specialty products agreements and hospitals actively support those contracts, the industry as a whole stands to benefit. If alliance and manufacturers do not attempt to negotiate specialty products agreements that bring value to both parties, hospitals will miss out on savings, and suppliers will lose market share opportunities.     

Growth at the EU periphery: the next enlargement

In 2004, 75 million people are scheduled to become EU citizens, making this the largest round of expansion of the Western European club to date. Of the 10 new entrants, 8 are former socialist economies, for which membership in the EU represents the coronation of an effort began with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Based on their recent economic performance, the Central and Eastern European countries appear to be well on their way to successfully integrate in the Western European club, while the Baltic Republics still lag behind. The gap between the two groups emerges when we consider the adjustment of the production structure, the composition of trade and FDI flows, and income distribution. The evidence we review appears to support the role of institutional quality to facilitate integration in the world market and overall economic performance.     

A new approach to estimating a profit frontier using the censored stochastic frontier model

The translog profit functional form is widely used to study technical efficiency for banks. Although this functional form is known as being flexible, it is not applicable to those banks incurring economic losses. The recently developed approach, i.e., the censored stochastic frontier model (CSFM), by Tsay et al. (2013) appears to be superior to existing approaches, since CSFM does not need to transform negative profit into positive profit before taking the natural logarithm. The transformation with respect to the profit variable tends to bias the parameter estimates of the profit frontier and the subsequent profit efficiency measure. We show that the parameter estimates of CSFM have the desirable statistical properties. Moreover, empirical results reveal that the mean profit efficiency of CSFM is more robust than those models using transformed profits across the sub-periods 1991–1998 and 1999–2009.     

Creative destruction over the business cycle: a stochastic frontier analysis

This paper examines the within-industry distributions of jobs created and destructed across plants in terms of technical efficiency, technical efficiency change, scale effect, and technical change. It further investigates how these distributions vary with economic activity. By applying the stochastic frontier analysis to plant-level longitudinal data on Taiwan??s 23 two-digit manufacturing industries spanning the period 1992?C2003, we find that jobs created (destructed) are disproportionately clustered at plants with lower technical efficiency but higher rate of technical change. A fall in economic activities is associated with a statistically significant decrease (increase) in the fraction of newly created (destructed) jobs accounted for by plants with a higher rate of technical change, indicating that creative destruction is more pronounced during economic contractions.     

Efficient frontier estimation: a maximum entropy approach

An alternative efficiency estimation approach is developed utilizing generalized maximum entropy (GME). GME combines the strengths of both SFA and DEA, allowing for the estimation of a frontier that is stochastic, without making an ad hoc assumption about the distribution of the efficiency component. GME results approach SFA results as the one-sided inefficiency bounds used by GME shrink. Results similar to DEA are achieved as the bounds increase. The GME results are distributed like DEA, but yield virtually the same rankings as SFA. The results suggest that GME may provide a link between various estimators of efficiency.

Money and production: A stochastic frontier approach

Considerable controversy surrounds the role of money in the production of goods and services. Previous empirical research has appeared to find that the real money stock affects aggregate output, holding other, more conventional inputs constant. However, the theoretical literature offers no convincing explanation for this empirical finding. One interpretation is that real money balances reduce the extent to which labor and capital are diverted into exchange-related activities instead of being used in production defined in a more narrow sense. To investigate this hypothesis, we estimate a production function augmented with real money balances as an input, using time-series data for the aggregate U.S. economy. A stochastic production frontier is then estimated without real money balances. We use these estimates to establish the presence of technical inefficiency. Finally, we show that the extent of technical inefficiency is negatively correlated with the real money stock. Our results provide a reconciliation between the empirical literature, which finds that real money balances affect output in a production function framework, and the theoretical literature, which suggests that real money balances enhance the technical efficiency of the economy.     

Donor advised funds: Ethical issues on the new frontier of philanthropy

This paper analyzes critical ethical and legal issues related to the administration and use of Donor Advised Funds for charitable fundraising in American philanthropy. With the swift and profound reshaping of the philanthropic landscape caused by Donor Advised Funds, the mainstream charitable world continues to both digest how these changes affect their work and address the myriad of legal, ethical and donor/public relations issues that arise in connection with gifts to and distributions from them. This paper discusses the most relevant legal and ethical principles governing the sponsorship of, receipt from and contribution to Donor Advised Funds, sets forth the significant legal and ethical issues faced by each of these parties, and finally, puts forth recommendation for them to follow.     

HRM and performance: what next?

The last decade of empirical research on the added value of HRM, also known as the ‘HRM and performance’ debate, demonstrates evidence that HRM does matter (Huselid, 1995; Guest et al, 2003; Wright et al, 2003). Unfortunately, the relationships are often statistically weak and the remlts ambiguous. This article reviews and attempts to extend the theoretical and methodological issues in this debate. Its aim is to build an agenda for future research in this area. A brief overview of achievements to date is followed by the theoretical and methodological issues related to what constitutes HRM, what is meant by the concept of perfomzance and the nature ofthe link between these two. In the final section, it is argued that research designs should start from a multi‐dimensional concept of performance, including the perceptions ofemployees; and build on the premise of HR systems as an enabling device for a whole range of strategic options. This implies a reversal of the strategy‐HRM linkage.     

Measuring mortgage credit availability: A frontier estimation approach

We construct a new measure of mortgage credit availability using a technique developed for production frontier estimation. The resulting “loan frontier” describes the maximum amount obtainable by a borrower of given characteristics. We estimate this frontier using mortgage originations data from 2001 to 2014. We find a substantial expansion of mortgage credit for all borrowers during the housing boom, not only for low‐score or low‐income borrowers. The subsequent contraction in credit was most pronounced for low‐score borrowers. Using variation in the frontier across metropolitan areas over time, we show that borrowing constraints played an important role in the recent housing cycle.     

Data aggregation in stochastic frontier models: the closed skew normal distribution

The effect of aggregation on estimates of stochastic frontier functions is considered. Inefficiency is assumed associated with the individual units being aggregated. In this case, the aggregated data have a closed skew normal distribution. Estimating the parameters of a closed skew normal distribution is difficult and so we focus mostly on the biases created by ignoring the fact that the data are aggregated. The conclusions are based on both analytical and Monte Carlo results. When data for firms are aggregates over smaller units and the inefficiency is associated with the units and not the firm, empirical work that does not consider the effect of aggregation will attribute the inefficiency of large firms to diseconomies of scale.     

Industrial relations in the next decade

Here the authors discuss current trends in British industrial relations and their likelihood of continuing. The central question is that of the probable consequences for management and unions of the sustained rise in unemployment.     

Stochastic frontier models using the Generalized Exponential distribution

Journal of Productivity Analysis - This paper develops a theoretical framework for modeling farm households’ joint production and consumption decisions in the presence of technical...     

Model averaging estimators for the stochastic frontier model

Journal of Productivity Analysis - Model uncertainty is a prominent feature in many applied settings. This is certainty true in the efficiency analysis realm where concerns over the proper...     

A stationary point for the stochastic frontier likelihood

The likelihood function for the stochastic frontier model is shown to possess an unusual stationary point which may or may not be a maximum. A condition is given to determine if the point is a maximum, and the result is interpreted in the context of specification and estimation.