The "barbarians" in the boardroom

According to conventional wisdom, the corporate raiders and buyout specialists who flourished in the 1980s were the antithesis of good management. Their goals of realizing quick profits from the acquisition of major companies--frequently through rapid cost-cutting and the breakup of conglomerates--made them the bane of old-school corporate leaders. Long-term management, it seemed, was being sacrificed on the altar of short-term profits. With the abatement of takeovers in recent times, top corporate managers have hailed a return to business-as-usual. But the takeover artists have not, in fact, retreated. Instead, these corporate acquirers, many of whom own large stakes in major industrial companies, are assuming board seats and switching their emphasis to overseeing the companies they control--with an eye toward the long term. In this new role, the takeover experts are not plunderers, nor are they creating quick profit at the expense of companies' long-term health; rather, they are defying expectations and, in a number of important respects, successfully implementing the agenda of the gurus of good management. Setting the pace in this new arena is the most powerful takeover group of the 1980s, the leveraged buyout firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company. KKR's partners hold board seats at nine different companies with $1 billion a year or more in sales.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Systematic review of models used in economic analyses in moderate-to-severe asthma and COPD

Background:

Respiratory diseases exert a substantial burden on society, with newer drugs increasingly adding to the burden. Economic models are often used, but seldom reviewed.

Purpose:

To summarize economic models used in economic analyses of drugs treating moderate-to-severe/very severe asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Methods:

This study searched Medline and Embase from inception to the end of February 2015 for cost-effectiveness/utility analyses that examined at least one drug against placebo, another drug, or other standard therapy in asthma or COPD. Two reviewers independently searched and extracted data with differences adjudicated via consensus discussion. Data extracted included model used and its qualities, validation methods, treatments compared, disease severity, analytic perspective, time horizon, data collection (pro- or retrospective), input rates and sources, costs and sources, planned sensitivity analyses, criteria for cost-effectiveness, reported outcomes, and sponsor.

Results:

This study analyzed 53 articles; 14 (25%) on asthma and 39 (75%) COPD. Markov models were commonly used for both asthma and COPD-related economic evaluations. Relatively few studies validated their model. For asthma-related studies, 10 examined inhaled corticosteroids and nine studied omalizumab. Placebo or standard therapy was the comparison in 11 studies and active drugs in the remainder.

Conclusions:

Few studies include validation of their models. Furthermore, controversy concerning some results was uncovered in this study, which needs to be avoided in the future.     

World Productivity Growth: A Model Averaging Approach

Policy makers and the economic researchers who provide them estimates of economic activity need to have an informative and scientifically‐based method to develop a consensus estimate for the most basic of the productivity measures, total factor productivity (TFP) growth. We discuss methods to combine the various estimates based on different empirical specifications that model and estimate productivity growth. We also discuss the various econometric approaches used in the profession to estimate productivity growth. Our focus is on world TFP growth.     

The Early History of the Cumulants and the Gram-Charlier Series

The early history of the Gram-Charlier series is discussed from three points of view: (1) a generalization of Laplace's central limit theorem, (2) a least squares approximation to a continuous function by means of Chebyshev-Hermite polynomials, (3) a generalization of Gauss's normal distribution to a system of skew distributions. Thiele defined the cumulants in terms of the moments, first by a recursion formula and later by an expansion of the logarithm of the moment generating function. He devised a differential operator which adjusts any cumulant to a desired value. His little known 1899 paper in Danish on the properties of the cumulants is translated into English in the Appendix.     

Educating ethical designers

In recent years, there has been an increased focus on bringing sustainability into design education. The focus of such education, however, mainly concerns providing design students with the knowledge and skills needed to create sustainable design, which, so this paper argues, may not be enough. Thus, with a basis in Aristotelian virtue ethics, this paper shows that sustainable design education may apply a broader perspective by also focussing on how to stimulate design students’ desire to create sustainable solutions as well as providing them with the means to engage others in such ideas. As compared to the identified literature, the present paper represents a novel perspective on sustainability in design education that may constitute a basis for further discussions and educational developments.     

R&D, Learning, and Phases of Economic Growth

The role of learning and R&D in economic development is addressed in an endogenous growth model. When human capital is below a threshold level, the model predicts that skills are accumulated as the only growth-generating activity, whereas both innovation activities and learning drive growth above this level. Hence, an endogenous regime shift is triggered when the level of human capital reaches the threshold level because it becomes profitable to innovate.     

On Long-term Forecasting of Social Security: A Robustness Analysis

In this paper we present a macro-economic demographic growth modelhaving a special focus on social security. It is designed to study the variability of responses of the system in presence of risks and uncertainties. Here we analyze the robustness of the model towards uncertainties in parameterspecifications, introduced by ARCH-M models with the incorporation ofintervention processes. The parameters varied are labor force participationrates (one of the key sources of uncertainty in the social security policydebate), and the parameters of the production function (the key source ofuncertainty in any long-run economic analysis). The sensitivity analysisfocuses on two variables: assets of the private pension system and thebalance of the public `Pay As You Go' pension system. Special attentionis given to convergence properties of the macro-economic model.     

Volatility Risk Premium,Risk Aversion,and the Cross‐Section of Stock Returns

We test if innovations in investor risk aversion are a priced factor in the stock market. Using 25 portfolios sorted on book‐to‐market and size as test assets, our new factor together with the market factor explains 64% of the variation in average returns compared to 60% for the Fama‐French model. The new factor is generally significant with an estimated risk premium close to its time series mean also when industry portfolios and portfolios sorted on previous returns are augmented to the test assets.