Indigenous Peoples’ Health Care: New approaches to contracting and accountability at the public administration frontier

Abstract

This article analyses reforms to contracting and accountability for indigenous primary health care organizations in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The reforms are presented as comparative case studies, the common reform features identified and their implications analysed.

The reforms share important characteristics. Each proceeds from implicit recognition that indigenous organizations are ‘co-principals’ rather than simply agents in their relationship with government funders and regulators. There is a common tendency towards more relational forms of contracting; and tentative attempts to reconceptualize accountability. These ‘frontier’ cases have broad implications for social service contracting.     

Casinos,casino size,and crime: A panel data analysis of Michigan counties

Growth in legal gaming in the United States over the past quarter century or so is well-documented. One important factor fueling this growth was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which permitted Native American tribes to establish, under agreements or “compacts” with the states in which they are located, casinos offering what is known as Class III gaming: slot machines, blackjack, roulette, and other games. Since the passage of the Act, there have been 21 Native American casinos established in Michigan. Also, three non-Native American casinos opened in Detroit in 1999 and 2000. This growth in the number of casinos has sparked a wide-ranging debate over the social and economic impacts of casino development.The purpose of this research is to focus on the crime issue in the broader casino debate. We investigate the impact of these Michigan casinos on the rates of burglary, robbery, larceny and motor vehicle theft (property crimes) in casino host counties as well as in nearby counties. We employ a panel data set with annual observations on all 83 Michigan counties for the period 1994–2010. The dataset includes crime rates taken from the FBI crime data series, variables for the presence of a casino in a county or in a nearby county, the scale of a casino's operations as measured by revenues, and a variety of control variables suggested by the broader literature investigating the factors that determine crime rates generally.Our results suggest that in most cases the property crime rates studied are not affected by the presence or size of a casino in a county or in a nearby county. The largest such impact, which is negative, is for motor vehicle theft. The size of a casino does have a small positive effect on the motor vehicle theft rate.     

Impact of uncertainty on high frequency response of the U.S. stock markets to the Fed's policy surprises

This paper examines the impact of uncertainty on estimated response of stock returns to U.S. monetary policy surprise. This is motivated by the Lucas island model which suggests an inverse relationship between the effectiveness of a policy and the level of uncertainty in the economy. Using high frequency daily data from the Federal funds futures market, we first estimate the response of S&P 500 stock returns to monetary policy surprises within the time varying parameter (TVP) model. We then analyze the relationship of these time varying estimates with the benchmark VIX index and alternative measures of uncertainty. Evidence suggests a significant negative relationship between the level of uncertainty and the time varying response of S&P 500 stock returns to unanticipated changes in the interest rate. Thus, at higher levels of uncertainty the impact of monetary policy shocks on stock markets is lower. The results are robust to different measures of uncertainty.     

SALES,INVENTORIES AND REAL INTEREST RATES: A CENTURY OF STYLIZED FACTS

We use Bayesian time‐varying parameter structural vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in reduced‐form and structural correlations between inventories and either sales growth or the real interest rate in the USA during both the inter‐war and post‐World War II periods. We identify four structural shocks by combining a single long‐run restriction to identify a permanent output shock with three sign restrictions to identify demand‐ and supply‐side transitory shocks. We show that during both the inter‐war and post‐war periods the structural correlation between inventories and real interest rate conditional on identified interest rate shocks is systematically positive; the reduced‐form correlation between the two series is positive during the post‐war period, but in line with the predictions of theory it is robustly negative during the inter‐war era; during that era the correlations between inventories and either of the two other series exhibit a remarkably strong co‐movement with output at business cycle frequencies. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Strategic Significance of Negative Externalities

Negative externalities have competitive relevance in a market when they have selective impacts – as, for example, when a product in use imposes greater costs on consumers of rival products than on other people. Because managers have discretion over aspects of product design that affect external costs, the externality in such cases may be viewed as a strategic variable. This paper presents evidence of the existence of competitively relevant negative externalities. I introduce a metric for the externality's competitive effect, the external cost elasticity of demand, which I estimate econometrically using data from the motor vehicle industry. Managerial implications are considered. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The dynamics of inter-firm networks in the course of the industry life cycle: the role of appropriability

This paper examines the dynamics of inter-firm networks and introduces a conceptual framework for explaining why inter-firm networks change over time. The framework is based on the idea that patterns of inter-firm linkages are linked to the life cycle development of an industry. Special emphasis is placed on the role of appropriabiliy, i.e. a firm's ability to capture the profits generated by its innovations. The (trans)formation of inter-firm networks in three industries is examined and used to illustrate the relevance of the framwork. One important inference from our study is that public policy makers and manageers should take into account the phase of industry development before implementing policies to create and/or change inter-firm networks.     

Fuzzy measurement of income inequality: Some possibility results on the fuzzification of the lorenz ordering

Summary This paper starts from the premise that the concept of income inequality is ill-defined, and hence, it studies the measurement of income inequality from a fuzzy set theoretical point of view. It is argued that the standard (fuzzy) transitivity concepts are not compatible with fuzzy inequality orderings which respect Lorenz ordering. For instance, we show that there does not exist a max-min transitive fuzzy relation on a given income distribution space which ranks distributions unambiguously according to the Lorenz criterion whenever they can actually be ranked by it. Weakening the imposed transitivity concept, it is possible to escape from the noted impossibility theorems. We introduce some alternative transitivity concepts for fuzzy relations, and subsequently, construct a class of fuzzy orderings which preserve Lorenz ordering and satisfy these alternative transitivities. It is also shown that fuzzy measurement can be used to construct confidence intervals for the crisp conclusions of inequality indices.I wish to thank Ashish Banerjee, Kaushik Basu, Larry Blume, Gary Fields, Semih Koray, Tapan Mitra, Antony Shorrocks, Sinan Unur and two anonymous referees of this journal for insighthul comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to the participants of the 1993 Midwest Mathematical Economics Conference held in University of Wisconsin at Madison and the 2nd International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare held in University of Rochester.     

How to control a chaotic economy?

An economic system which exhibits chaotic behaviour has been stabilized on various periodic orbits by use of the Ott-Grebogi-Yorke method. This procedure has been recently applied to controlling chaotic phenomena in physical, chemical and biological systems. We adopt this method successfully for Feichtinger's generic model of two competing firms with asymmetrical investment strategies. We show that the application of this control method to the particular economic process considered brings a substantial advantage: one can easily switch from a chaotic trajectory to a regular periodic orbit and simultaneously improve the system's economic properties. Numerical simulations are presented in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the whole procedure.The work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and by the Polish National Council (KBN) Grant No 2 P302 038 04.     

The Structure of the American Economy

We explore the relationship between input–output accounts and the national revenue function. The generalized inverse of an economy's technology matrix carries information relating changes in endowments with changes in outputs; its transpose relates output prices and factor prices. Our primary theoretical contribution is to derive an economy's revenue function for an arbitrary Leontief technology. Our main empirical contribution is to compute the national revenue function for the American economy in 2003 and to describe its properties. We implement our ideas using two different models: one where all factors are mobile and another with sector‐specific capital.