The legal challenge to ERISA preemptions

Managed care, once celebrated as a vehicle to halt the increasing cost of health care, has come under increasing fire from patients and health care providers, accused of cutting costs and managing care at the expense of patients. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) has been a shield for managed care organizations (MCOs), buffeting them from liability for quality-of-care issues. Lawsuits and legislation are chipping away at the protective shield of ERISA as MCOs find themselves more liable for their decisions and for the care provided by physicians with whom the MCO contracts and provides financial incentives for controlling cost of medical care.     

Are we operating effectively? A lean analysis of operating theatre changeovers

Hospital operating theatres are a critical but costly resource in healthcare processes. Their efficiency and utilisation impact upon hospital finances, clinical effectiveness and patient outcomes. Operations management techniques have now been applied widely to optimise flow. An important challenge is to balance the needs of process flexibility, efficiency and work standardisation with clinical requirements. This paper applies operations management methods to analyse elective orthopaedic surgery at five international hospitals to describe the issues that affect operating theatre productivity. It utilises an innovative method of video analysis to observe patient changeovers over 29 days of surgery and data is analysed to understand the causes of variability and waste. The findings suggest that processes which are standardised via operations management methodologies can improve productivity in a process that exhibits wide variation in practice. There are apparent trade-offs associated with efficiency and clinical concerns such infection control, that lead to different standard process archetypes being utilised. Recommendations for standardising patient changeovers are provided.     

EVIDENCE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

This research provides empirical support for the hypothesis that learning economics increases a student's critical thinking skills. Using the short form of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA-S) as our measure of critical thinking skills, we find that students who gain a high level of economic understanding in their introductory economics class, as measured by the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE), have statistically significant gains in their WGCTA-S scores. Students who spend more time taking classes and are more fully engaged in the university experience also have greater gains in critical thinking. These results lend support to the idea that introductory economics courses can work in concert with other university level courses, especially within the context of a full-time curriculum, to enhance critical thinking skills. ( JEL A22)     

Russia and the global intellectual services markets

The incipient process of intellectualization of global development is described and the role and behavior of intellectual (nonmaterial) services in the world economic relations is presented. Russia’s position on global nonmaterial service markets is analyzed in comparison with other countries. The scope for utilization of the Russian scientific, educational and other intellectual potential in its foreign economic activities is expounded.     

Deep habits and the dynamic effects of monetary policy shocks

We introduce deep habits into a sticky-price sticky-wage economy and examine the resulting models ability to account for the impact of monetary policy shocks. The deep habits mechanism gives rise to countercyclical markup movements even when prices are flexible and interacts with nominal rigidities in interesting ways. Key parameters are estimated using a limited information approach. The deep habits model can account very precisely for the persistent impact of monetary policy shocks on aggregate consumption and for both the price puzzle and inflation persistence. A key insight is that the deep habits mechanism and nominal rigidities are complementary: the deep habits model can account for the dynamic effects of monetary policy shock at low to moderate levels of nominal rigidities. The results are shown to be stable over time and not caused by monetary policy changes.     

Financial Education and Counseling—Still Holding Promise

This article reviews the evaluation literature on financial education and counseling for adults in order to synthesize implications for research and practice. Most evaluations report positive impacts, but the findings are often small when compared with valid comparison groups. Many evaluations use self-reported measures, measure outcomes over short time periods and cannot rule out selection bias due to nonrandomized designs, all of which may bias results. Although future research and practice in this field hold promise, more attention to theory-based evaluations and further investment in randomized field experiments may be fruitful.     

Effects of ideal image congruence and organizational commitment on employee intention to leave

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among employee self-image/store image congruence, employee–store commitment, and employee intention to leave within the context of retail stores. Data were collected using a survey method. Usable questionnaires were completed by 276 retail store employees. Path analysis was used to test the hypotheses. Results revealed employee self-image/store image congruence was positively related to store image attractiveness. In turn, store image attractiveness was positively related to employee–store commitment both directly and indirectly through intrinsic job satisfaction. Lastly, both intrinsic job satisfaction and employee–store commitment were negatively related to employees’ intention to leave.     

Interrelations between the dynamics of oil prices and demand: Contemporary characteristics

The article shows that the unprecedented rise in oil prices was in recent years accompanied by an increase in oil consumption. The author considers the growth that was seen in the magnitude of oil sales despite multiple increases in price to be, along with the buying up of oil as a high liquidity asset, a phenomenon that indicates an approaching crisis and allows us to create new approaches to its forecasting.     

On Choosing Among House Price Index Methodologies

This paper compares housing price indices estimated using three models with several sets of property transaction data. The commonly used hedonic price model suffers from potential specification bias and inefficiency, while the weighted repeat-sales model presents potentially more serious bias and inefficiency problems. A hybrid model combining hedonic and repeat-sales equations avoids most of these sources of bias and inefficiency. This paper evaluates the performance of each type of model using a particularly rich local housing market database. The results, though ambiguous, appear to confirm the problems with the repeat sales model but suggest that systematic differences between repeat-transacting and single-transacting properties lead to bias in the hedonic and hybrid models as well.