'Don't try this at home': health policy lessons for the NHS from the United States

The US healthcare system is fragmented, chaotic and wasteful, and prevailing American social values and attitudes to health and healthcare are profoundly different from those found in the United Kingdom. Even so, there are many useful ideas and important lessons to be drawn from the US experience. The transfer of policy ideas and innovations needs, however, to take account of the differences in culture and context.     

Updating toward the signal

Modelers frequently assume (either implicitly or explicitly) that an agent??s posterior expectation of some variable lies between their prior mean and the realization of an unbiased signal of that variable. We call this property updating toward the signal (UTS). We show that if the prior and signal error densities are both symmetric and quasiconcave then UTS will occur. If, for a given prior, UTS occurs for all symmetric and quasiconcave error densities, then in fact the prior must be symmetric and quasiconcave. Similar characterizations are derived for two additional updating requirements that are strictly weaker than UTS.     

Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era

This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration comes from the transformation of the credit market in the United States. This market works as both as a leveling force and as a condenser of new forms of social difference. The U.S. banking and credit system has greatly broadened its scope over the past twenty years to incorporate previously excluded groups. We observe this leveling tendency in the expansion of credit amongst lower-income households, the systematization of overdraft protections, and the unexpected and rapid growth of the fringe banking sector. But while access to credit has democratized, it has also differentiated. Scoring technologies classify and price people according to credit risk. This has allowed multiple new distinctions to be made amongst the creditworthy, as scores get attached to different interest rates and loan structures. Scores have also expanded into markets beyond consumer credit, such as insurance, real estate, employment, and elsewhere. The result is a cumulative pattern of advantage and disadvantage with both objectively measured and subjectively experienced aspects. We argue these private classificatory tools are increasingly central to the generation of “market-situations”, and thus an important and overlooked force that structures individual life-chances. In short, classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations.     

The Trade Union Role in Career Development: a Membership Perspective

This article explores how a highly unionised and professional occupational group, school teachers, want their trade union to be involved in their career development. By taking an apparently individualistic concept and considering it from a collective perspective, the article provides insights into a neglected aspect of career development.     

HOW INVESTORS INTERPRET CHANGES IN CORPORATE FINANCIAL POLICY

In May 1987, Apple Computer announced that it would pay $5 million in cash dividends on its common stock your cents per share) for the first time in its history. On the day of the announcement, the market value of Apple's equity rose by $219 million.
In May 1986, Emhart announced that it intended to issue 2.75 million shares to raise $102 million in new equity. Following the announcement, the market value of its existing equity fell by $23 million.
In February 1939, General Motors declared a 2-for-1 stock split for the first time since 1955, and increased its dividends. The announcement led the market value of GM's equity to increase by $1.3 billion.     

Discussion of Privacy in E-Commerce: Development of Reporting Standards, Disclosure, and Assurance Services in an Unregulated Market

Jamal, Maier, and Sunder (hereafter, JMS), have written an interesting paper on the development of standards in an unregulated market. The development of private standards and assurance that there is compliance are important for creating trust among market participants and for the success of new markets. The paper is relevant for accounting professionals who are responsible for assuring investors that firms' financial information is reliable and trustworthy. It shows that there is demand for market standards absent regulation, that firms voluntarily adopt standards, and that they generally comply with them. The authors contrast these findings with the regulated outcomes in the capital market and raise questions about the merits of regulation.     

Conditional convergence and the dynamics of the capital-output ratio

Output per worker can be expressed as a function of technological efficiency and of the capital-output ratio. Because technology is exogenous in the Solow model, all of the endogenous convergence dynamics take place through the adjustment of the capital-output ratio. This paper uses the empirical behavior of the capital-output ratio to estimate the speed of conditional convergence of economies towards their steady-state paths. We find that the conditional convergence speed is about seven percent per year. This is somewhat faster than predicted by the Solow model and is significantly higher than reported in most previous studies based on output per worker regressions. We show that, once there are stochastic shocks to technology, standard panel econometric techniques produce downward-biased estimates of convergence speeds, while our approach does not. The views expressed in this paper are our own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ireland or the ESCB.     

A Critical Theory and Postmodernist approach to the teaching of accounting theory

This paper outlines my teaching philosophy for the Accounting Theory subject. A Critical Theory and Postmodernist approach is recommended, which makes full use of non-accounting “tangential” material [Boyce G. Critical accounting education: teaching and learning outside the circle. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 2004;15(4/5):565–86] and material from popular culture [Kell P. A teacher's tool kit: an introduction to social theory. In: Allen J, editor. Sociology of education: possibilities and practices. 3rd ed. Southbank, Melbourne: Social Science Press; 2004. p. 29–51 [chapter 2]; Nilan P. ‘Reality TV’? School students and popular culture. In: Allen J, editor. Sociology of education: possibilities and practices. 3rd ed. Southbank, Melbourne: Social Science Press; 2004. p. 306–21 [chapter 14]]. The paper discusses some classroom interactive activities, as well as interview results from interviews conducted with 11 international students and one Australian student at Charles Sturt University. The teaching approach proposed in this paper is to conduct classroom interactive activities which study theories and research results from a range of disciplines in order to illustrate key points that apply equally as much to accounting theories and the accounting research process, e.g. the Positive/Normative dichotomy. Classroom interactive activities are discussed in class using the “dialogical approach” to education recommended by Freire [Freire P. Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Pelican; 1996], Kaidonis [Kaidonis MA. Teaching and learning critical accounting using media texts as reflexive devices: conditions for transformative action or reinforcing the status quo? Critical Perspectives on Accounting 2004;15(4/5):667–73], Boyce [Boyce G. Critical accounting education: teaching and learning outside the circle. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 2004;15(4/5):565–86], and Thomson [Thomson I, Bebbington J. It doesn’t matter what you teach? Critical Perspectives on Accounting 2004;15(4/5):609–28]. Once students gain experience in studying material from outside accounting, the interview results suggest that they are then better motivated [Wynder M. Creative management accountants: short case studies to promote creativity in the classroom. In: Paper presented at the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand annual conference; 2006] and better equipped to study and evaluate accounting theories.     

Post-normal science in postnormal times

Post-normal science (PNS) was a herald of postnormal times. For Functowicz and Ravetz contemporary issues in which ‘facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’ necessitate PNS. PNS deals with the postnormal character of contemporary challenges by bringing the contextualised insights of non-scientific stakeholders to bear through the formulation of ‘extended facts’. However, while the contextual content of ‘extended facts’ caters to the indeterminate character of postnormal issues this remains in tension with an implicit assumption that outcomes reflect the quality of the ‘facts’ informing them. This paper takes the claim that postnormal times involves ‘that we abandon…ideas of ‘control and management” seriously by arguing that science should be the servant of outcomes framed in, primarily, societal terms, rather than the other way around. This argument is illustrated using the example of fashioning an effective response to climate change.