Vying for time. Work and family

Time--there is never enough of it. There are never enough hours in the day to do everything at work and at home. Today's employees, forced to choose between work obligations and family responsibilities, often feel frazzled and guilty. Some employers recognize these conflicts and are finding ways to lighten the work/family load. They are offering a sophisticated combination of dependent-care options, flexible work hours and family-related benefits tailored to meet the needs of the employees within their specific industries. HRMagazine looks at leaders in six major industries--manufacturing, health, communications/technology, financial management, government and retail. No one can give employees that 25-hour day that everyone feels they need to juggle all their work and family obligations. But these industry leaders have provided a nurturing environment where employees can successfully balance those obligations.     

Understanding the flow of health policy in the United States: self-interest or ignorance?

Health policy decisions are made in an uneven manner, eluding attempts to explain developments with a coherent theory. Numerous explanations have been suggested to explain individual policy actions, but recently Feldstein has attempted a broader formulation. This Self-Interest Model of Health Policy, however, assumes full knowledge of a policy's benefits and costs. This is an unrealistic assumption, and the model is unable to explain important decisions that have been made in three areas: insurance for long-term care, universal access, and efficiency incentives. This article presents a broader, more powerful formulation of the Feldstein model, specifically incorporating public ignorance as a policy determinant. The vital role of education and health policy research is underscored.     

The effect of prospective payment under DRGs on the market value of hospitals

This article investigates the effect of a change in Medicare payment regulations on for-profit hospital market values. A theoretical argument on the effects of this regulatory event is presented in which hospital managers are concerned about firm wealth but also value prestige, provider perceptions of quality, and perhaps other prerequisites. In this case, DRGs will induce hospitals to seek higher wealth because they increase the opportunity cost of nonpecuniary benefits. The issue is pursued empirically by estimating the market response to DRG legislation using seemingly unrelated regressions.     

Regional, national, and spatially explicit scenarios of demographic and economic change based on SRES

We report here spatially explicit scenario interpretations for population and economic activity (GDP) for the time period 1990 to 2100 based on three scenarios (A2, B1, and B2) from the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). At the highest degree of spatial detail, the scenario indicators are calculated at a 0.5 by 0.5 degree resolution. All three scenarios follow the qualitative scenario characteristics, as outlined in the original SRES scenarios. Two scenarios (B1 and B2) also follow (with minor adjustments due to scenario improvements) the original SRES quantifications at the level of 4 and 11 world regions respectively. The quantification of the original SRES A2 scenario has been revised to reflect recent changing perceptions on the demographic outlook of world population growth. In this revised “high population growth” scenario, A2r world population reaches some 12 billion by 2100 (as opposed to some 15 billion in the original SRES A2 scenario) and is characterized by a “delayed fertility transition” that is also mirrored in a delayed (economic) development catch-up, resulting in an initially stagnating and subsequently only very slow reduction in income disparities. The spatially explicit scenario interpretation proceeds via two steps. Through a combination of decomposition and optimization methods, world regional scenario results are first disaggregated to the level of 185 countries. In a subsequent second step, national results are further disaggregated to a grid cell level, taking urbanization and regional (rural–urban) income disparities explicitly into account. A distinguishing feature of the spatially explicit scenario results reported here is that both methodologies, as well as numerical assumptions underlying the “downscaling” exercise, are scenario-dependent, leading to distinctly different spatial patterns of population and economic activities across the three scenarios examined.     

Access Pricing,Quality Degradation,and Foreclosure in the Internet

Access to both a local and a global network is needed in order to get complete connection to the Internet. The purpose of this article is to examine the interplay between those two networks and how it affects the domestic public policy towards a domestic provider of local access. We find that a cost-oriented regulation is detrimental to domestic welfare, because it shifts profit to the foreign provider of global access. The optimal policy is that the regulator commits itself to set an access price above costs, possibly the same price as in an unregulated market economy. A regulation of the global access price has a non-monotonic effect on domestic welfare, and there is a potential conflict between international and domestic regulation policy.     

A New Approach to Random Utility Modeling using the Dirichlet Multinomial Distribution

In this paper we introduce a new econometricapproach to analyzing recreational site choicedata, the Dirichlet multinomial model. Thismodel, which nests the standard conditionalmultinomial logit model, can accommodateover-dispersed data and may provide moreefficient estimators of coefficients andconsequent welfare measures than the standardconditional logit model, which is so widelyused in the Random Utility Model approach torecreation demand. We illustrate thisDirichlet approach using a data set of rockclimbers in Scotland, and study the impacts onper-trip consumers surplus of alternativemanagement strategies for popular rock climbingsites. Results show that the Dirichletmultinomial approach produces coefficient andwelfare estimates having smaller samplingvariability in this case. We also compareclassical welfare measures with their posteriorequivalents, which allow for welfare changes tobe dis-aggregated.     

On some criteria for the formulation and testing of economic growth models

This paper presents a methodology for the formulation and testing of economic growth models. The model selected includes two production sectors with physical and human capital accumulation. These capital stocks are associated with spillover effects in the production of the physical good and in the accumulation of both factors.