Comparing NHS Hospital Unit Costs

Efforts to improve the efficiency of the hospital sector in the National Health Service (NHS) have concentrated on measuring the unit costs of service provision. Hospitals identified as having high unit costs are considered poor performers. Several indices have been constructed to measure unit costs. These produce conflicting messages: hospitals with relatively high unit costs as measured using one index may have low unit costs according to another index. Furthermore, the publication of cost information may lead to unintended consequences and perverse behaviour, rather than genuine performance improvements. To get a more accurate picture of performance, cost information should be included within a broader performance assessment framework for hospitals.     

Gains from Trade: Implications for Labour Market Adjustment and Poverty Reduction in Africa

Abstract: This paper reassesses the gains from trade for sub‐Saharan Africa, and draws their implications for labour market adjustment and poverty reduction. It reviews previous studies on multilateral liberalization, focusing on the findings from Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models with relevance to African economies. The implications of these findings for poverty reduction are discussed. Our own CGE exercise supports the hypothesis that African countries cannot expect substantial gains from further multilateral liberalization. Moreover, given the sharp contraction of import‐competing sectors in response to trade liberalization in many African economies, coupled with insufficient compensation through labour market adjustments in other sectors, this study suggests that the ultimate impact on poverty reduction is likely to be small or even negative.     

Modelling Transparency in Disclosure: The Case of Foreign Exchange Risk Management

Abstract:  When managers choose not to disclose all the relevant information in their possession in their financial statements, there is an information gap between the managers and users and consequently a lack of transparency. We model the degree of transparency observed when disclosures of foreign exchange (FX) risk management in financial statements are compared to managerial information on FX risk management policy, as evidenced in questionnaire responses. In this comparative study of US and UK firms we find incomplete disclosure in both samples but with differing aspects. In the US case, the information gap is lower where the information has higher relevance or firms with higher financial risk (greater leverage) are signalling the extent of risk, but the gap is greater where firms are in competitive product markets. For the UK sample, the information gap is significantly lower where firms have higher financial risk or higher liquidity but the gap is greater where the shares are more closely held. We conclude that modelling and explaining this aspect of incomplete accounting disclosure in an international setting must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate national differences in managerial behaviour.     

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.     

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.