The Rise and Rise of Evidence in Health Care

Health care practitioners (especially doctors) have always given assurances that what they do is efficacious. But in the past 50 years justification of the effectiveness of health care interventions has attained a new prominence. Evidence, at least notionally, now lies at the heart of health care policy and practice. This article provides an overview of the generation and use of evidence on effectiveness in health care. It explains why rigorous methodologies have taken hold and describes the major preoccupation with trying to ensure that research evidence has an impact on clinical practice. The strengths and weaknesses of evidence-based health care are explored to identify the opportunities for profitable transfer of experience across the public sector.     

Business Ethics Resources on the Internet

There are an abundance of business ethics resources on the Internet. This paper details Internet resources with the following categories: Ethics Associations and Institutes, Ethics Journals, University Ethics Centers, Business Professions’ Code of Conduct, Business Codes of Conduct, and Ethics Cases.     

中国降息源于担心美国危机影响

【美国《华尔街日报》9月16日】牛国央行6年多以来首次降息，这一出人意料的举措凸显出对美国金融体系的担忧已令全世界的经济工作重点发生变化。     

中国或以提振内需应对外部经济挑战

中国24日将公布2007年第四季度及全年经济数据，去年的经济增长率连续第二年超过11％几乎已成定局，这一增长水平即使以中国近年来的标准衡量也是相当高的。     

“Rulers ruled by women”: an economic analysis of the rise and fall of women’s rights in ancient Sparta

Until modern times, most women possessed relatively few formal rights. The women of ancient Sparta were a striking exception. Although they could not vote, Spartan women reportedly owned 40 percent of Sparta’s agricultural land, and enjoyed other rights that were equally extraordinary. We offer a simple economic explanation for the Spartan anomaly. The defining moment for Sparta was its conquest of a neighboring land and people, which fundamentally changed the marginal products of Spartan men’s and Spartan women’s labor. To exploit the potential gains from a reallocation of labor—specifically, to provide the appropriate incentives and the proper human capital formation—men granted women property (and other) rights. Consistent with our explanation for the rise of women’s rights, when Sparta lost the conquered land several centuries later, the rights for women disappeared. Two conclusions emerge that may help explain why women’s rights have been so rare for most of history. First, in contrast to the historical norm, the optimal (from the men’s perspective) division of labor among Spartans involved women in work that was not easily monitored by men. Second, the rights held by Spartan women may have been part of an unstable equilibrium, which contained the seeds of its own destruction. For helpful comments, we thank Yoram Barzel, Paul Cartledge, Beth Davenport, Dino Falaschetti, Nancy Folbre, Barbara Hanssen, Ron Johnson, Lea Kosnik, Francine Lafontaine, Dean Lueck, Sarah Pomeroy, Mark Ramseyer, Randy Rucker, Wendy Stock, Chris Stoddard, Werner Troesken, Doug Young, and seminar participants at Colby College, George Mason University, Montana State University, the Property and Environment Research Center, the University of Virginia, Wabash College, the 2006 meetings of the Economic History Association, and the 2007 meetings of the American Economic Association.     

The Location of US States' Overseas Offices

Forty US states operated an overseas office in 2002. Treating overseas offices as sales offices, the model assumes offices facilitate exports by reducing the transaction cost of selling abroad. From theory, states operate an office if aggregate savings outweigh operating costs. Exploiting the differences in where states locate offices in the data, and controlling for aggregate characteristics, the paper estimates the impact of exports on the probability of an office existing. In addition, the average state savings from an office is 0.04–0.10% of exports, with a cut‐off threshold of US$850 million.     

Local Confidence——Global Opportunities

Confidence in your own profes- sional judgement; that＇s one goal all internationally-minded business executives need to embrace.Far too often, management teams spend a great deal of time and energy looking for “outside solutions”, or transplanting foreign business models into their strategic plans （which may or not be suitable for the context）. Instead, sometimes the ‘best practice＇ might be the one closest at hand; one＇s own orofessional iudgement.     

Products and Productivity*

When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity reflects both characteristics of the firm and attributes of the products that are non‐randomly chosen by the firm. This paper develops a model of industry equilibrium in which firms endogenously sort across products and characterizes the resulting bias in measured firm and aggregate productivity. Calibrating the model's parameters, we show that endogenous product selection can have quantitatively important effects on measured firm and aggregate productivity and their response to changes in parameter values.     

Uncovering uncovered interest parity during the classical gold standard era, 1888–1905

This paper examines the uncovered interest parity hypothesis using the dollar-sterling exchange rate during the gold standard era. This period is interesting because the exchange rate was seasonal, because transactions costs were high, and because occasions when uncovered interest rate speculation did not occur can be identified. The paper shows UIP speculation frequently did not occur, that speculation was most active in response to expected exchange rate changes not interest differentials when it did occur, and that profitability varied systematically with interest rate differentials. The estimated UIP equations are substantially improved by distinguishing occasions when sterling was borrowed not lent.