Market games with asymmetric information: the core

This paper concerns cores of economies with asymmetric information. Alternative definitions of the information available to traders in coalitions and the cooperative games they generate are analyzed. An important technical result states that such NTU games in characteristic function form are well defined. Properties of various cores with asymmetric information are examined. Sufficient conditions on information sharing rules are provided for the induced games to be totally balanced or balanced, so that their cores are nonempty. Incentive compatibility issues are considered. Finally, a perspective on this research area is provided.     

Registered nurses' perceptions of nursing

In Part II of this six part series on the state of the registered nurse (RN) workforce in the United States, the focus is on RNs' perceptions of nursing including RNs' satisfaction with their jobs in general and on specific elements of their work experiences, such as the quality of professional relationships. Satisfaction with a nursing career and whether RNs would recommend nursing to others are also examined. The improvements in nursing found in this analysis of two national surveys in 2002 and 2004 should be broadly communicated not only to energize individuals and organizations to continue their efforts to improve the workplace environment, but to challenge the many individuals in the nursing profession who hold onto a sense that nothing will ever improve in their organizations.     

Allocating Government Education Expenditures Across K-12 and College Education

As of the late 1990s, public spending on education in the US comprised approximately 7.1% of GDP; about 60% of that support was directed at K-12 education and the remainder at college education. We investigate the welfare and output implications of this spending in a theoretical model in which agents of differential innate ability choose whether to pursue higher education. Higher ability agents support greater expenditures at both the K-12 and college levels. When public education expenditures are low, all agents prefer that spending be directed solely to K-12 education; when expenditures are high, all prefer that some spending be allocated to college education.     

Efficient Insurance Contracts under Epsilon-Contaminated Utilities

This paper analyses the qualitative properties of optimal contracts when agents have multiple priors and are uncertainty averse in an infinite state space framework. The case of the epsilon-contamination of a given prior, a basic tool in robustness theory is fully developped. It is shown that if both agents have strictly concave utility index, then if the insurer is less uncertainty averse than the insured, he provides a full insurance contract above a deductible for high values of the loss.     

An Examination of the U.S. Public Accounting Profession’s Public Interest Discourse and Actions in Federal Policy Making

Participation in the political process by the United States public accounting profession often blurs the role of the profession as advocates for the public interest with its role as advocates for its own private interests. In this study, we draw from prior theoretical and empirical work to investigate recent federal political activities of the public accounting profession to shed light on these sometimes contradictory roles. In particular, we investigate ten contemporary regulatory issues of interest to the AICPA. We analyze 36 AICPA legislative advocacy letters related to these issues that were provided to federal policy makers. In addition, we analyze the public accounting profession’s federal lobbying reports that were submitted during this same time period. The analysis allows us to assess the public interest discourse present in the AICPA legislative letters as well as the extent of political action taken by the profession related to these issues based on the profession’s lobbying efforts. Our analyses (1) demonstrate that the profession’s discourse and actions often reflect both public and private interest motivations, (2) allow us to categorize the profession’s advocacy efforts as arising from specific motivations, and (3) show that the profession’s public interest arguments used to advocate for their policy positions change depending upon the specific legislative issue being considered.     

SMEs’ Financing and Banks’ Profitability: A “Good Date” for Banks in Ghana?

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the core of most economies and are a major source of economic growth. In recent times, banks have been actively involved in the financing of SMEs through the provision of loans to this sector. This paper investigates the impact of SMEs financing on banks’ profitability in Ghana. The study employed the fixed effect model as the main regression tool. The study result reveals that SMEs significantly contribute to banks’ profitability in Ghana. Interestingly, transaction cost in administering SME loans was insignificant in all the models. Higher inflation reduces the real value of the loan and erodes the interest returns on the total credit to the SMEs. Conversely, growth of GDP enhances the growth of the bank profit.