Intrapreneurship and firm entrepreneurial orientation: insights from the health care service industry

Intrapreneurship affects our daily lives and is a research topic of great importance. Given the current economic climate, its relevance to firm performance has increased considerably both among academics and practitioners. Specifically, our approach has focused on the identification, analysis and explanation of the determinants/variables that influence the intrapreneurship process in the health care service industry, including the private, public and social sectors. The methodology employed consisted of collecting primary data via a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire was sent by e-mail to health care employees and middle managers from the northern and center regions of Portugal, and the study covered 202 professionals from 45 organizations. The results show that the participating health care team members present intrapreneurial behavior, and health care organizations create favorable internal conditions that support the theoretical concepts of intrapreneurship and firm entrepreneurial orientation (FEO).     

Cost-effectiveness analysis in the Spanish setting of the PEAK trial of panitumumab plus mFOLFOX6 compared with bevacizumab plus mFOLFOX6 for first-line treatment of patients with wild-type RAS metastatic colorectal cancer

Objective: To assess the cost-effectiveness of panitumumab in combination with mFOLFOX6 (oxaliplatin, 5-fluorouracil, and leucovorin) vs bevacizumab in combination with mFOLFOX6 as first-line treatment of patients with wild-type RAS metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) in Spain.

Methods: A semi-Markov model was developed including the following health states: Progression free; Progressive disease: Treat with best supportive care; Progressive disease: Treat with subsequent active therapy; Attempted resection of metastases; Disease free after metastases resection; Progressive disease: after resection and relapse; and Death. Parametric survival analyses of patient-level progression free survival and overall survival data from the PEAK Phase II clinical trial were used to estimate health state transitions. Additional data from the PEAK trial were considered for the dose and duration of therapy, the use of subsequent therapy, the occurrence of adverse events, and the incidence and probability of time to metastasis resection. Utility weightings were calculated from patient-level data from panitumumab trials evaluating first-, second-, and third-line treatments. The study was performed from the Spanish National Health System (NHS) perspective including only direct costs. A life-time horizon was applied. Probabilistic sensitivity analyses and scenario sensitivity analyses were performed to assess the robustness of the model.

Results: Based on the PEAK trial, which demonstrated greater efficacy of panitumumab vs bevacizumab, both in combination with mFOLFOX6 first-line in wild-type RAS mCRC patients, the estimated incremental cost per life-year gained was €16,567 and the estimated incremental cost per quality-adjusted life year gained was €22,794. The sensitivity analyses showed the model was robust to alternative parameters and assumptions.

Limitations: The analysis was based on a simulation model and, therefore, the results should be interpreted cautiously.

Conclusions: Based on the PEAK Phase II clinical trial and taking into account Spanish costs, the results of the analysis showed that first-line treatment of mCRC with panitumumab?+?mFOLFOX6 could be considered a cost-effective option compared with bevacizumab?+?mFOLFOX6 for the Spanish NHS.     

Evaluating the risk premium in the U.S.A. natural gas market: evidence from low-price regime

In recent years, the U.S.A. natural gas market has seen enormous changes. The expectations of abundant supply of shale gas and the slow U.S.A. economic recovery have pushed gas prices below US$ 4 MMBtu. Although shale gas is a new promising source of unconventional energy, investors face uncertain investment plans. In this study, we investigate the risk premium by comparing behaviour before and after the change point in agents risk perception. Unlike traditional empirical research on risk premium, we use the parametric, two-factor model of Schwartz and Smith (2000) to evaluate the implied risk premium term structure from futures prices traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). We compare our findings with other empirical results and find that the change point lies at the beginning of the low-price regime. When we compare periods before and after the change point, we observe that the risk premium changed, not only in sign, but also in magnitude.     

External Conditions,the Evolution of Financial Risks,and the Informational Content of Stock Prices: The Case of Chile

ABSTRACT

In this article, we find that the dynamics of local financial risks in the Chilean stock market are associated with the evolution of external economic conditions, with a strong reduction in both idiosyncratic and systematic risks during periods of stable conditions. Despite this, we fail to find any significant change in the traditional measures of stock price synchronicity developed in the R² literature in our sample. We argue that these measures neglect the relationship between stock prices and fundamentals and find that the strength of the association between prices and fundamentals changes during our sample period, being much stronger during times of stable external conditions and diminished stock price volatility.     

Do interest rate options contain information about excess returns?

There is strong empirical evidence that long-term interest rates contain a time-varying risk premium. Options may contain valuable information about this risk premium because their prices are sensitive to the underlying interest rates. We use the joint time series of swap rates and interest rate option prices to estimate dynamic term structure models. The risk premiums that we estimate using option prices are better able to predict excess returns for long-term swaps over short-term swaps. Moreover, in contrast to the previous literature, the most successful models for predicting excess returns have risk factors with stochastic volatility. We also show that the stochastic volatility models we estimate using option prices match the failure of the expectations hypothesis.     

Credit and inflation under borrower?s lack of commitment

In this paper we study the effects of monetary policy on privately supplied credit in model economies where money is needed for transaction purposes and agents who default on their loans cannot participate in the credit market but are allowed to accumulate money. In our deterministic benchmark economy where agents alternate in productivity, credit has the role of smoothing consumption. We show that deflation crowds out credit completely. The reason is that deflation increases the value of being excluded from the credit market and eliminates the incentive to repay loans. When inflation is positive but low, credit, consumption smoothing and welfare increase with inflation, until inflation reaches a threshold at which the allocation is efficient and money becomes superneutral.     

Employment and Exchange Rates: The Role of Openness and Technology

Real exchange rate movements are important drivers of the reallocation of resources between sectors of the economy. Economic theory suggests that the impact of exchange rates should vary with the degree of exposure to international competition and with the technology level. We show that both the degree of openness and the technology level mediate the impact of exchange rate movements on labour market developments. According to our estimations, whereas employment in high-technology sectors seems to be relatively immune to changes in real exchange rates, these appear to have sizable and significant effects on highly open low-technology sectors. The analysis of job flows suggests that the impact of exchange rates on these sectors occurs through employment destruction.     

Are costs really sticky? Evidence from publicly listed companies in the UAE

This article measures the degree of adjustment between operating revenues and costs for publicly listed companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Traditional cost models assume that variable costs change proportionally in response to an upward or downward fluctuation in demand. However, in recent years, such an assumption has been questioned by a variety of papers from the economics and accounting fields. Typically, cost stickiness is defined as costs decreasing by less than 1% when sales decrease by 1%, while reacting closer to the proportion of change when sales increase. This study, unlike the vast majority of the literature, did not find cost stickiness in the UAE after using panel data regression analysis. The main explanation is that UAE has mostly expatriate labour force that does not have the typical benefits of employment protection legislation (EPL) available in other national jurisdictions. EPL is a main reason that costs adjustments during decreasing sales is curbed due to the associated costs of firing employees.     

If You Blog,Will They Follow? Using Online Media to Set the Agenda for Consumer Concerns on “Greenwashed” Environmental Claims

Agenda-setting theory is used to investigate if consumers' online opinions on “greenwashed” advertisements (misleading green advertisements) are influenced by the agenda set by online newspaper articles and environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) blogs. Leximancer is initially used to obtain attributes and identify themes from four different online stakeholder discussions on greenwashing. Content analysis and cross-lagged correlations are further used to verify if blogs and news articles set the substantive attribute salience in the consumer discussions over a 12-month period (January–December 2009). We found two significant themes in the various stakeholder discussions on greenwashing: marketing communication credibility and impact on natural environment. Results also indicate a bidirectional agenda-setting relationship between consumers and other stakeholders from the same country.