Real and perceived losses from unemployment: a cross-country study

This article compares the Unemployment Rate (UR) as a measure of inefficiency with several other potential measures across 18 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Results show that the UR is not a very good measure of relative inefficiency between countries, it overestimates the number of individuals who would get jobs if the market is clear, the Dead Weight Losses (DWLs) of UR are remarkably low even in high unemployment countries and the aggregate perceived monetary losses by the unemployed as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are also uniformly low, although inframarginal individuals in some countries may perceive their losses to be high.     

Health IT adoption,productivity and quality in primary care

Within the last decade, there has been a growing push towards the use of electronic medical records and health information technology (IT) within primary care physician practices. Despite financial subsidies, smaller practices remain reluctant to adopt these information systems. Using a nationally representative survey of physicians, this study explores the relationship between physician, practice and area attributes and the adoption of health IT systems. Controlling for these attributes, the analysis subsequently studies the relationship between health IT, physician productivity and perceived quality of care. It finds that smaller practices and physicians with lower incomes are less likely to adopt health IT systems and that adoption varies with the type of medical conditions the practice typically treats. With regards to productivity, health IT adopters are more likely to see fewer patients and spend a larger amount of time on each visit with marginal increases in time on administrative tasks and no differences in perceived ability to deliver quality health care.     

Are auction revenues affected by rising art buyers’ premia? The case of early American art

The steady rise in the premiums charged to art buyers at auction (above hammer price) has been underway since 1992. This article, using a stable and bounded sample of repeat purchase of American works created before 1950, reveals that this tact has reduced hammer prices for that art. However, renewed and hyper-competitive efforts to bring more and higher quality art to market by the two main houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have resulted in general profitability. Nevertheless, we calculate that a rise in buyers’ premia at Sotheby’s, a publically traded company, has reduced revenues and profits below their potential in the absence of such increases.     

Chinese firm and industry reactions to antidumping initiations and measures

China has been the subject of large numbers of both antidumping initiations and measures. This article explores the reactions of Chinese firms and industries to these actions by using dynamic system GMM estimator and industrial panel data on all Chinese firms in the industry, foreign firms operating within China and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for aggregated firms group between 1997 and 2007. We find that antidumping actions by developed and developing countries negatively impact industrial profits and employee and firm numbers and also exports, but improve labour productivity. We also find that different kinds of firms show different responses. All firms together in an industry react to antidumping the most, and foreign and SOE firms show a much smaller response. Further, antidumping effects from different countries are different. Developed countries’ antidumping actions have more negative impact than developing countries’ actions; the effects of US actions are different from the European Union’s.     

TV viewing: application of a formal choice model

Choices of television programs is viewed as a process of deciding among a set of alternative goods with zero prices. A choice model can thus be based purely on individuals' preferences for various characteristics of a set of shows available, incorporating the option of not watching if all shows are too dissimilar to these desires. The shows are first grouped according to salient characteristics and a preferred value for each characteristic is estimated for each potential viewer. A perceived position of each show is similarly estimated and watching is shown to decline as similarity between preferred show and available alternatives declines. The choice model predicts show choice better than simpler models based on aggregate audience measures or on network loyalty, but the explanatory power is weak; some suggestions for improvement are made.     

Measurement of hospital case-mix: A note on alternative patient classifications

There is a general and growing displeasure with the commonly used methods by which hospital output is measured, and, therefore, with the methods for measuring hospital costs. ^{1 1}Discussions of output measurement problems may be found in REDER (1965), BERRY (1967), SOMERS and SOMERS (1967), LAVE and LAVE (1971), NEWHOUSE (1970), RAFFERTY (1971), and LEE and WALLACE (1971), among others. This disaffection springs largely from the questionable assumption of homogeneity that is implied when output is measured in the traditional units (number of patients or patient-days of care), for it is increasingly evident that output is not homogeneous in this respect. ^{2 2}For example, Lave and Lave have shown that hospitals do differ in the mix of the case-types which they treat (1971), and I have shown previously that case-type proportions vary in the short-run within the individual hospital system (1971 and 1972). Thus, attention is turning increasingly toward the measurement and analysis of case-mix behaviour, since these variations in the patient census reflect variations in output mix itself.

This study is limited to just one of the problems which arise in connection with any case-mix analysis, the problem of how to specify the case-types. Case-types may be identified by means of a few very broad categories or on the basis of the several thousand specific diagnoses, but there exists some trade-off between the degree of specificity and the ease of obtaining and handling the requisite empirical data. In the hope of facilitating future research efforts in this area, this paper examines several alternative methods of specifying the case-types, for the limited purpose of identifying differences among them in their sensitivity to case-mix variations.     

TO ADMIT OR NOT TO ADMIT: THE QUESTION OF RESEARCH PARK SIZE

A theoretical model is used to explore the determinants of the optimum size of a private research park and the effect of university affiliation on that optimum size. Parks are assumed to operate as cooperatives where costs are equally shared among the member firms, and optimality occurs when the firms’ average net benefits are maximized. To achieve this, existing members of a park will limit the park's size, denying entry to firms who wish to join and are willing to share the costs. University affiliation may either increase or decrease the optimum size of a park.     

Product development as reading and writing doings within sociotechnical practices: the reciprocity between engineers and artefacts

This ethnographic study aims at understanding how product development of wind turbine controls unfolds as ongoing engineer-artefact reciprocity. We adopt a Deweyan constructionist and Science-Technology-Society approach to contribute to product development and sociomaterial studies by emphasising the role of reciprocity between engineers' experience and artefacts through reading and writing doings. Reading doings involve texts such as specifications, minutes, sketches and components. Writing doings create/modify the same type of texts. In one project, convergent reciprocity enabled the development. Another project's development was blocked, restarted and completed internally at the producer. Enablers included repositioning of working practices, application of various artefacts/tools, heterogeneous engineers and creation of common ground. Constraints involved lack of openness, too malleable artefacts, no common ground and radical change of the development trajectory. The engineers' learning depends on these constraints and enablers. Three types of reciprocity occur: convergent, faded away and blocked.     

Budgetary institutions and fiscal discipline: Edmund Burke's insightful contribution

Recent developments in the political economy of public finance literature have focused on the features of budgetary institutions that facilitate budgetary discipline — a sub-discipline of constitutional economics. In this literature, there has been no attempt to trace the development of economic thought on the relationship between budgetary institutions and fiscal discipline. This may be because debt accumulation in peacetime is seen as a late twentieth-century phenomenon. As a result, Edmund Burke's contribution, in his speech ‘On Economical Reform’, seems to have been forgotten. This paper highlights Burke's contribution and identifies the extent to which it captures those features of budgetary institutions that are currently recognized as facilitating budgetary discipline.     

An Alternative Monetary Model of Inflation and Growth

This paper presents a simple model of a monetary economy in which production takes time and is financed by loans from financial intermediaries such as banks. The model is an example of a pure credit economy, but does not contain the contentious Wicksellian construct of a natural rate of interest. Rather, the main determining factor of economic outcomes is the struggle over income distribution between finance (Keynes's rentiers), industry, and labour. The model yields a number of macroeconomic results, some of which are sharply at variance with those obtained in more orthodox or mainstream, models. In particular, a structural long-term Phillips-curve type relationship emerges in inflation-growth space, for some demand-side and monetary policy changes. In addition, the model is also able to identify other circumstances in which the opposite cases of either stagflation or non-inflationary growth can occur.