WIC Participation and Relative Quality of Household Food Purchases: Evidence from FoodAPS

We examine the effect of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on the quality of household food purchases using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) and propensity score matching. A healthy purchasing index (HPI) is used to measure nutritional quality of household food purchases. WIC foods explain the improvement in quality of food purchases, not self‐selection of more nutrition‐conscious households into the program. The improvement in purchase quality was driven entirely by WIC participating households who redeemed WIC foods during the interview week. There was no significant difference between WIC participants who did not redeem WIC foods and eligible nonparticipants. In this sample, there is no evidence that lack of access to clinics has adverse effects on participation nor is there evidence that HPI depends on supermarket access. A supervised machine learning process supports our main conclusion on the importance of WIC foods.     

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.     

Making judgment calls. The ultimate act of leadership

According to the traditional view, judgment is an event: You make a decision and then move on. Yet Tichy, of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, and Bennis, of the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, found that good leadership judgment occurs not in a single moment but throughout a process. From their research into the complex phenomenon of leadership judgment, the authors also found that most important judgment calls reside in one of three domains: people, strategy, and crisis. Understanding the essence of leadership judgment is crucial. A leader's calls determine an organization's success or failure and deliver the verdict on his or her career. The first phase of the judgment process is preparation--identifying and framing the issue that demands a decision and aligning and mobilizing key stakeholders. Second is the call itself, And third is acting on the call, learning and adjusting along the way. Good leaders use a "story line"--an articulation of a company's identity, direction, and values--to inform their actions throughout the judgment process. Boeing CEO Jim McNerney, for instance, focused on a story line of Boeing as a world-class competitor and ethical leader to make a judgment call that launched the company's recovery from a string of ethical crises. Good leaders also take advantage of "redo loops" throughout the process, reconsidering the parameters of the decision, relabeling the problem, and redefining the goal in a way that more and more people can accept. Procter & Gamble's A.G. Lafley and Best Buy's Brad Anderson have both used redo loops--in preparation and execution, respectively--to strengthen not only support for their calls but also the outcomes.     

Health care reform: universal access is feasible and necessary

While other industrial nations' health care systems have their own problems, they have more leeway to address those problems than does the United States, which spends twice as much on per capita health care as the average for other industrial capitalist democracies yet ranks average or below average in many comparative measures of health care quality. In fact, the authors of this article argue that international experience shows that assurance of universal access through expanded government involvement could provide savings while actually improving the quality of U.S. health care. In addition, universal access would recognize health care as a basic human right, not a commodity to be bartered in the marketplace and allocated based on class, race and social position.     

Wage differences between Austrian men and women: <Emphasis Type="Italic">semper idem?</Emphasis>

In most OECD countries, the wage gap between men and women has narrowed during the past two decades. Developments of the last 20 years, e.g., increased labour market attachment of women or the introduction of equal pay laws, may have reduced the gender wage gap. We investigate the extent, persistence, and socio-economic determinants of the gender wage gap in Austria, for the years 1983 and 1997. Using wage decomposition techniques, we find that the average gender wage gap was almost as high in 1997 as it was in 1983. Not accounting for differences, the gender wage gap dropped from 25.5 to 23.3% of men’s wages. Taking observable differences between men and women into account, we estimate that the mean gender wage gap that cannot be explained, i.e., discrimination against women, dropped from 17 to 14% of men’s wages. A decomposition of the gender wage gap over time indicates that both returns to human capital and less discrimination were responsible for the narrowing of the gender wage gap.

Regional and Sector-specific Determinants of Industry Dynamics and the Displacement–replacement Effects

In this paper, we empirically assess the importance of regional and sector-specific determinants of industry dynamics. To this aim we test three hypotheses (originally proposed by Shapiro and Khemani (1987, Int J Indust Organ 5:15–26)) for the relationship between the entry and exit of firms: independence, symmetry and simultaneity. Estimates from a panel data system of equations seem to confirm the simultaneity hypothesis for Spain, i.e. we find evidence of a displacement (replacement) effect between the gross rate of entry (exit) and the gross rate of exit (entry). Also, our results show that, irrespective of the hypothesis we use, both sectorial and regional variables affect entry and exit.

Leadership, civility, and the 'No Jerks' rule

Nursing organizations and hospitals are not immune from the ravages of incivility. Toxic behavior can range from the very serious bullying and sabotage of very destructive people to the annoying and hard to cope behavior of just plain jerks. When a unit does not have a clearly defined "No Jerk" rule and infrastructure to support healthy behavior, communication suffers and errors occur. Nurse leaders have the opportunity of changing the self-interest behavior of jerks in our communities of caring.