Benefit cost management in the new millennium

The new millennium will bring new challenges to managing employee benefit plans. Costs are going up. The provider community is consolidating. The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) have added cost and complexity to benefit plans. Employers expect strategic partnering and a high degree of flexibility while simultaneously reducing benefit managers' budgets and staff. This article provides specific strategies and tactics for managing benefit costs in this new era.     

Investitionsvolumen und Herausforderungen eines nationalen Glasfaserausbaus in Deutschland

Der fl?chendeckende Glasfaserausbau in Deutschland ist mit hohen Kosten verbunden. Insbesondere die Anschlüsse in dünn besiedelten Gebieten lassen die Kosten steigen. Die Autoren berechnen verschiedene M?glichkeiten der Kostenaufteilung.     

再见,祝你好运,下周见

这是公司发展史上策划最周详的过渡之一.两年前,微软公司董事长比尔·盖茨宣布,他将放手在这家他与别人共同创建的公司的日常管理责任,把更多的时间投入慈善事业.从那以后,盖茨和微软公司首席执行官史蒂芬·巴尔默提拔了那些将会接替盖茨,为微软公司开发技术、战略和远景的人.     

The institutional ideas virus: the case of Johan Åkerman

Swedish economists have received impulses from historical or institutuionalist sources on many occasions. A couple of these economists, Gunnar Myrdal and Johan Åkerman, received obvious impulses from American institutionalism. This article deals with the case of Åkerman. To attempt a wall-to-wall chart of institutional influences on an economist is hardly possible. But what is possible is to examine occasions when he was exposed to powerful ‘jolts’, viz in conjunction with studies at an American university. Johan åkerman studied at Harvard in Cambridge in 1919–20. he evetually became – alongside Myrdal – the leading institutional economist.     

Implications of Economic Interdependence for Endogenous Wage Indexation Decisions

This paper shows how economic interdependence affects the indexation decisions of atomistic wage setters in an environment in which monetary authorities do not observe stochastic disturbances before making their policy choices. If stochastic disturbances are common across countries, interdependence has no effect on equilibrium indexation choices in identical countries. However, if disturbances are country specific, numerical simulations show that interdependence is likely to reduce equilibrium indexation choices relative to a small open economy. We also show that indexation choices may be either strategic complements or strategic substitutes, but that strategic complementarity becomes more likely as the degree of interdependence rises.     

Adverse Selection and Pay Compression

A fundamental result of the principal-agent literature is that pay will be linked to performance when it is difficult for the principal to monitor the agent's actions. However, performance pay can lead to adverse incentives. In these models, high-powered incentives encourage workers to neglect some aspects of their job or to sabotage their coworkers' efforts. This paper offers another explanation for the weak link between pay and performance: worker heterogeneity. When workers are heterogeneous and labor contracts are contests, the Nash equilibrium often pools workers. I show that this implies that the link between pay and performance is weaker than would be the case if firms could observe workers' types before contracting and offer each type their respective optimal contests.     

Cow-calf profitability and leptin genotyping

Profitability of cow-calf production is determined largely by market prices, calf weaning weights, and cow productive life. While producers individually have no effect on prices, weaning weights and productive life have genetic influences and hence can be altered by selection programs implemented by producers. We investigate the impact of a mutation in the leptin gene (exon 2; single nucleotide polymorphism [SNP] 305) on cow-calf profitability. Prior research shows that this mutation has effects on performance and traits of fed cattle and milk production in dairy cows. Using data from a teaching-research herd, we find that it is also associated with calf weaning weights and cow productive life. A bio-economic stochastic simulation demonstrates that the mutation has statistically positive impacts on profits, suggesting that producers can profitably make use of this information.     

Coddling Our Kids: Can Parenting Style Affect Attitudes Toward Advergames?

This study examined parents’ understanding of and experience with child-targeted advergames through exploratory interviews and quantitative pretests of an advergaming definition. Exploratory findings revealed that parents tended to overgeneralize when identifying advergames. Through the use of an online survey, this study also examined how parental socialization styles affect parents’ attitudes toward advergames. As predicted, results indicate that authoritarian and authoritative parents hold more negative perceptions toward advergames compared to indulgent parents, while all parenting styles exhibited negative leanings toward advergaming as a practice. These findings indicate the efficacy of parental socialization theory in explaining parents’ perceptions and attitudes toward this new form of advertising—advergames. We discuss important implications for regulators, practitioners, and parents.     

Market information: Selling intensity and the dynamics of international economic integration

Summary We may assume the more a firm has traded previously with a particular party, or a particular country, the lower the costs of market information will be. When a firm starts to trade with a new country, we may further assume that the greater the cultural distance is between this country and its own country, the larger the information costs will be.A statistical study of the Swedish imports of selected consumers goods after the establishment of EFTA indicates that these assumptions hold true for non-selling intensive commodities, but not for selling intensive commodities.The research on which this paper is based is a part of a more general study of how various knowledge factors influence international business decisions, which will be published in a forthcoming bookHow Foreign is Foreign Trade? A first draft of the paper was written during a stay at the International Institute of Management in Berlin, and I am grateful for the aid which I recieved from the Institute's staff during its preparation. I am also most grateful Michal Groniewitz at the Institute of Business Studies in Uppsala whose time-consuming and tedious task it has been to prepare the tables on Swedish imports, on which the statistical part of the study has been based.