Societal burden of cluster headache in the United States: a descriptive economic analysis

Aim: To estimate direct and indirect costs in patients with a diagnosis of cluster headache in the US.

Methods: Adult patients (18–64 years of age) enrolled in the Marketscan Commercial and Medicare Databases with ≥2 non-diagnostic outpatient (≥30 days apart between the two outpatient claims) or ≥1 inpatient diagnoses of cluster headache (ICD-9-CM code 339.00, 339.01, or 339.02) between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2014, were included in the analyses. Patients had ≥6 months of continuous enrollment with medical and pharmacy coverage before and after the index date (first cluster headache diagnosis). Three outcomes were evaluated: (1) healthcare resource utilization, (2) direct healthcare costs, and (3) indirect costs associated with work days lost due to absenteeism and short-term disability. Direct costs included costs of all-cause and cluster headache-related outpatient, inpatient hospitalization, surgery, and pharmacy claims. Indirect costs were based on an average daily wage, which was estimated from the 2014?US Bureau of Labor Statistics and inflated to 2015 dollars.

Results: There were 9,328 patients with cluster headache claims included in the analysis. Cluster headache-related total direct costs (mean [standard deviation]) were $3,132 [$13,396] per patient per year (PPPY), accounting for 17.8% of the all-cause total direct cost. Cluster headache-related inpatient hospitalizations ($1,604) and pharmacy ($809) together ($2,413) contributed over 75% of the cluster headache-related direct healthcare cost. There were three sub-groups of patients with claims associated with indirect costs that included absenteeism, short-term disability, and absenteeism?+?short-term disability. Indirect costs PPPY were $4,928 [$4,860] for absenteeism, $803 [$2,621] for short-term disability, and $3,374 [$3,198] for absenteeism?+?disability.

Conclusion: Patients with cluster headache have high healthcare costs that are associated with inpatient admissions and pharmacy fulfillments, and high indirect costs associated with absenteeism and short-term disability.     

Entrepreneurial performance of early-stage ventures: dynamic resource management for development and growth

Effective allocation of resources for the development and growth of early-stage ventures (ESVs) is a continuous challenge for their equity stakeholders. This paper explores the relevance of intellectual capital (IC) as a critical resource for entrepreneurial performance in ESVs driven by new knowledge development and technological innovation. An interdisciplinary literature review is conducted to examine prior studies on entrepreneurial performance and resource management for ESVs. A conceptual framework is developed using a taxonomy of IC that explains how the underlying network resources enhance the development and growth of ESVs. Utilizing a multiple case study approach, this paper suggests a dynamic process of resource allocation into heterogeneous IC that are optimally coordinated by the founders during an ESV’s development and growth through interaction with external networks. This approach in resource allocation complements the staged entrepreneurial finance and investment strategy for ESVs and their subsequent developments.     

Context,market economies and MNEs: The example of financial incentivization

This is a study of the relative utilization of reward systems within and between capitalist archetypes: the study includes not only a closer focus on diversity within and between coordinated market economies, but pays specific attention to the Japanese case, and a systematic comparison of the reward practices adopted by multinational enterprises vis-à-vis their local peers. The study uses the most recent (at the time of writing) wave of the Cranet international survey of HRM. We found clear, firm-level evidence that share schemes and performance related pay exhibit significant differences both within and between varieties of capitalism, highlighting the extent to which key features of reward system continue to vary according to institutional setting, and whether an organization is multinational or not.     

Does Private Money Buy Public Policy? Campaign Contributions and Regulatory Outcomes in Telecommunications

To what extent can market participants affect the outcomes of regulatory policy? In this paper, we study the effects of one potential source of influence—campaign contributions—from competing interests in the local telecommunications industry, on regulatory policy decisions of state public utility commissions. Our work is unique in that we test the effects of campaign contributions on measurable policy outcomes. This stands in stark relief against most of the existing literature, which examines potentially noisier measures of policy outcomes—such as the roll‐call votes of legislators, to examine how private money may influence public policy. By moving to more direct measures of policy effects, and using a unique new dataset, we find, in contrast to much of the literature on campaign contributions, that there is a significant effect of private money on regulatory outcomes. This result is robust to numerous alternative model specifications. We also assess the extent of omitted variable bias that would have to exist to obviate the estimated result. We find that for our result to be spurious, omitted variables would have to explain more than five times the variation in the mix of private money as is explained by the variables included in our analysis. We consider this to be very unlikely.     

Explanations of the demand for labour in the United Kingdom engineering sector

This paper presents a set of employment functions for nine individual engineering industries using annual data for the period 1954–1987 for the United Kingdom. A brief review alternative theoretical specifications is undertaken. A set of co-integrating regressions is computed to establish the existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between employment and inter aliaoutput and real wages. Based on the results of the co-integration exercise, full unrestricted dynamic equations are obtained and these are then reduced to a more parsimonious representation. The finally preferred restricted models are then tested against a number of diagnostic statistical criteria to establish their robust and efficient properties. The value of these equations for explaining past and predicting future employment and training in the engineering sector is assessed.     

Fictitious commodification and agrarian change: Indigenous peoples and land markets in Highland Ecuador

Creating private property rights and establishing land markets were fundamental to the historical development of capitalism in the Global North and remain at the centre of capitalist development in the Global South. This article contributes to debates about these processes by analysing the relationship between land markets and indigenous peoples in Highland Ecuador. Building on Karl Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities, it elaborates a new concept that makes an analytical distinction between the activation and development of land markets. The former refers to the occasional participation of actors in markets to secure land, whereas the latter relates to the establishment and expansion of markets that regulate the distribution and value of land through market prices. Focusing on indigenous land struggles in the late 20th century, this article shows that the activation of land markets created opportunities for indigenous peasants to secure land, whereas the development of land markets closed them down. Social and class differentiation among the highland indigenous population increased through this contradictory process. The article connects this historical analysis to recent developments in Ecuador to contribute to empirical and theoretical debates about contemporary land struggles and agrarian change elsewhere in the Global South.