OECD Export Credit Agencies: Supplementing Short-Term Export Credit Insurance during the 2008 Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT

The 2008 financial crisis impacted international trade in part due to decreases in trade finance and export credit insurance. This article shows that Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states used their public Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) to supplement the lack of private short-term export credit insurance as a means to increase trade. All OECD states, except Greece and Estonia, either increased the capacity of their ECAs to provide short-term export credit insurance, or they developed new products for this purpose. More generally, states that changed their short-term export credit insurance programs had major trading partners with defaults.     

Strategic giving and the nursing shortage

• Health care organizations in the United States face a significant nursing shortage, which seriously impacts the quality and availability of health care. Confronting this challenge requires involvement from organizations beyond the public sector. This paper explores an initiative by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, exemplifying the concept of ‘strategic philanthropy,’ to contribute their financial resources and strong institutional ties to respond to the current and future shortage of nurses in Florida. Through this intervention, the company and partnering organizations hope to benefit the health care sector, the public, and themselves from the outcomes associated with the generation of a greater supply of nurses.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

International and Cultural Variations in Employee Assistance Programmes: Implications for Managerial Health and Effectiveness*

abstract While employee assistance programmes (EAPs) are becoming commonplace in large Western organizations, little is known regarding their prevalence in non‐Western cultures. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the prevalence of EAPs in four distinct cells of societal culture‐based variations. A cultural matrix for analysing the relative emphases of styles of coping, social support systems, rites and rituals, and the prevalence of EAPs is developed. The implications for managerial health and effectiveness in the global context are discussed.     

A Learning Framework for Customer Integration: Know-How Acquisition, Dissemination and Utilization

Successful product innovation has increasingly been recognized as an outcome of integrating customers in the new product development process. Despite the attention of this research subject, the comprehension of how to learn from customers is still limited in scope and in depth. This research investigates ‘learning’ in the customer integration context and discusses a conceptual framework from learning theory with customer know-how acquisition, dissemination and utilization as critical steps. The paper reports a comparative case study of new product development projects in a business-to-business context. The findings show empirical support for the developed framework and demonstrate the importance of a differentiated consideration of the three steps. They lead to determinants for successful customer know-how integration in new product development projects.     

Information technology, nurse staffing, and patient needs

As health care organizations increasingly adopt health information technology, time-sensitive data that track patients' requirements for nursing care and nurses' responsiveness to these needs might be available to support evidence-based nurse staffing decisions. care information technologies available in hospitals and on nursing units may provide valuable sources of information that can be translated into usable data. In this study, the usefulness of electronic data obtained from a nurse tracking call light system as a source of information for quality measurement was explored. The findings point to what might be under-utilization of existing health information technology to track patients' needs and nurses' responsiveness, patient census, and patient movements. The authors recommend health information technology be used less as support for other organizational systems and more as an administrative resource that can allow nurse executives to be more actively engaged within and across nursing environments.     

Enhancing nursing as a career choice with fifth-grade students

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of a career education program on children's interest in nursing as a career choice, especially related to gender in fifth-grade students. A within-subjects design compared interest in nursing as a career of 70 fifth-grade students before and after participation in a 4-week career education program about nursing. There was a 61% (N = 70, p < 0.001) increase of students expressing they would consider nursing as a career after participating in the career education program. This positive effect was discovered among both male and female students. Further results provided a pre and post-career assessment of the students' development that was congruent with findings from previous vocational studies. The results underscore the positive effect career education can have on children's career interests and substantiate the importance of exposing students to practicing nurses as a key strategy to stimulate interest in nursing to help maintain a steady recruitment of young people into the future nursing workforce.     

Psychological Pathways to Fraud: Understanding and Preventing Fraud in Organizations

In response to calls for more research on how to prevent or detect fraud (ACAP, Final Report of the Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession, United States Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC, 2008; AICPA, SAS No. 99: Consideration of Fraud in a Financial Statement Audit, New York, NY, 2002; Carcello et al., Working Paper, University of Tennessee, Bentley University and Kennesaw State University, 2008; Wells, Journal of Accountancy, 2004), we develop a framework that identifies three psychological pathways to fraud, supported by multiple theories relating to moral intuition and disengagement, rationalization, and the role played by negative affect. The purpose of developing the framework is twofold: (1) to draw attention to important yet under-researched aspects of ethical decision-making, and (2) to increase our understanding of the psychology of committing fraud. Our framework builds on the existing fraud triangle (PCAOB, Consideration of fraud in a financial statement audit. AU Section 316, , 2005) which is used by auditors to assess fraud risk. The fraud triangle is composed of three factors that, together, predict the likelihood of fraud within an organization: opportunity, incentive/pressure, and attitude/rationalization. We find that, when faced with the opportunity and incentive/pressure, there are three psychological pathways to fraud nestled within attitude/rationalization: (1) lack of awareness, (2) intuition coupled with rationalization, and (3) reasoning. These distinctions are important for fraud prevention because each of these paths is driven by a different psychological mechanism. This framework is useful in a number of ways. First, it identifies certain insidious situational factors in which individuals commit fraud without recognizing it. Second, it extends our knowledge of rationalization by theorizing that individuals use rationalization to avoid or reduce the negative affect that accompanies performing an unethical behavior. Negative affect is important because individuals wish to avoid it. Third, it identifies several other methods fraudsters use to reduce negative affect, each of which could serve as potential “psychological red flags” and helps predict future fraudulent behavior. Finally, our framework can be used as a theoretical foundation to explore several interventions designed to prevent fraud.