The clinton health reform

There are some difficult, even some agonizing tradeoffs, that we have to confront if we want to achieve the objectives of universal coverage and cost containment set forth in the Clinton plan. Will universal coverage lead to uniform results? If we mandate coverage, who is actually going to be paying for it and in what form? Do targeted subsidies based on nonincome classifications of individuals (i.e., employment status) create more distortion than equity? A concern to focus on is whether the Clinton plan will be controlling health care spending or an individual's ability to spend for their choice of health care.     

Institutional Monitoring: Evidence from the F‐Score

The extant literature shows that institutional investors engage in corporate governance to enhance a firm's long‐term value. Measuring firm performance using the F‐Score, we examine the persistent monitoring role of institutional investors and identify the financial aspects of a firm that institutional monitoring improves. We find strong evidence that long‐term institutions with large shareholdings consistently improve a firm's F‐Score and that such activity occurs primarily through the enhancement of the firm's operating efficiency. Other institutions reduce a firm's F‐Score. Moreover, we find evidence that, while monitoring institutions improve a firm's financial health, transient (followed by non‐transient) institutions trade on this information.     

Motivations and Use Context in Mobile Tourism Shopping: Applying Contingency and Task–Technology Fit Theories

Mobile tourism shopping is an emerging market, but there is little theoretically based research on the topic. This study investigates the impact of motivations (value, enjoyment, time saving and mobility) on consumer satisfaction by applying contingency and task–technology fit theories in the mobile tourism shopping context. The results show that value and enjoyment have significant effects on satisfaction. Use context is found to have a full mediating role between time saving and satisfaction as well as between mobility and satisfaction. This study offers theoretical and practical contributions to the tourism literature and mobile tourism industry. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Note on the applicability of the VCG mechanism to capacitated assignment problems and extensions

For the allocation of heterogeneous items, it is known that the buyers-are-substitutes condition is necessary and sufficient to ensure that a pricing equilibrium can yield the same allocation and payments as the VCG mechanism. Furthermore, concavity of the corresponding transferable utility TU-game guarantees that this VCG outcome can also be achieved by an ascending price auction. We show that concavity, and hence the buyers-are-substitutes condition, holds for the TU-game of the assignment problem with general capacities. Therefore, the VCG mechanism is supported by a pricing equilibrium which can also be achieved by an ascending auction. We also show that the buyers-are-substitutes condition, and hence concavity, does not hold anymore for very natural and straightforward extensions of this problem. This shows that the necessity of the substitutes property is a considerable restriction on the applicability of the VCG mechanism.     

Foreign Direct Investment in the Enlarged EU: Do Taxes Matter and to What Extent?

Foreign direct investment is of increasing importance in the European Union. This paper estimates the effect of taxes on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows and on three sub-components of these flows for the countries of the enlarged European Union. The model in the spirit of gravity equations robustly explains FDI flows between the 25 member states. Sample selection needs to be addressed in the estimation. We show that the different subcomponents of FDI should and indeed do react differently to taxes. After controlling for unobserved country characteristics and common time effects, the top statutory corporate tax rate of both, source and host country, turn insignificant for total FDI and investment into equity. However, high source country taxes clearly increase the probability of firms to re-invest profits abroad and lower the percentage of debt financed FDI. This might reflect profit re-allocation to avoid taxes. Market size factors have the expected signs.

Greening transportation fleets: Insights from a two-stage game theoretic model

The greening of organizational transportation fleets, especially trucks and automobiles, has gained increasing attention by companies in a variety of industrial sectors. The reasons for this concern and attention are due to regulatory and competitive pressures, but also increasing costs of fossil-fuels. Surprisingly the amount of research and modeling for fleet management overall has been rather limited, with the focus on managing green vehicle investments virtually non-existent. In this study we develop a two-stage game theoretic model that helps evaluate, from both policy and organizational perspectives, the implications of greening of transportation fleets. Various parameters are evaluated including factors such as innovations in green vehicle technology, levels of service differences, cost of fuel, adjusting tax policy, regulatory compliance requirements, and adaptation costs. This evaluation provides practical insights into actions that could be considered by regulators and organizations to encourage environmental investments.