The impact of health information technology on hospital productivity

Health information technology (IT) has been championed as a tool that can transform health care delivery. We estimate the parameters of a value‐added hospital production function correcting for endogenous input choices to assess the private returns hospitals earn from health IT. Despite high marginal products, the total benefits from expanded IT adoption are modest. Over the span of our data, health IT inputs increased by more than 210% and contributed about 6% to the increase in value‐added. Not‐for‐profits invested more heavily and differently in IT. Finally, we find no compelling evidence of labor complementarities or network externalities from competitors' IT investment.     

Hedging Longevity Risk When Interest Rates are Uncertain

Abstract

This paper proposes an asset liability management strategy to hedge the aggregate risk of annuity providers under the assumption that both the interest rate and mortality rate are stochastic. We assume that annuity providers can invest in longevity bonds, long-term coupon bonds, and shortterm zero-coupon bonds to immunize themselves from the risks of the annuity for the equity holders subject to a required profit. We demonstrate that the optimal allocation strategy can lead to the lowest risk under different yield curves and mortality rate assumptions. The longevity bond can also be regarded as an effective hedging vehicle that significantly reduces the aggregate risk of the annuity providers.     

The Ethical Judgment of Private Club Senior Executives

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to investigate effects of working experience and organization size on ethical judgments on ethical issues among senior private club executives. Senior club executives at small and large private clubs were given five vignettes, representing ethical dilemmas in five categories of ethical behavior identified by previous researchers. They were asked to determine whether each issue was a question of ethics or not (N = 413). The multivariate analysis of variance results indicate that senior executives working in the large-sized club with more than 20 years’ hospitality working experience tend to make higher ethical judgments on ethical issues.     

Effects of Earnings Forecasts and Heightened Professional Skepticism on the Outcomes of Client–Auditor Negotiation

Dismissal is a major issue for distributive justice at work, because it normally has a drastic impact on an employee’s livelihood, self-esteem and future career. This article examines distributive justice under the US’s employment-at-will (EAW) system and New Zealand’s just-cause dismissal system, focusing on the three main categories of dismissal, namely misconduct, poor performance and redundancy. Under EAW, employees have limited protection from dismissal and remedies are restricted to just a few so-called exceptions. Comparatively, New Zealand’s just-cause system delivers much more just outcomes, both in terms of remedies and punishments. Despite a few shortcomings, it should be considered as a reasonable reference for policy changes in the US.     

Understanding china's economic performance

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978: the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. Specifically, the resulting non-capitalist institutions are claimed to be successful in (a) agriculture where land is not owned by the fanners; (b) township and village enterprises (TVEs) which are owned collectively by rural communities; and (c) state owned enterprises (SOEs) where increased competition and increased wage incentive, but not privatization, have been emphasized.

The convergence school holds that China's successes are the consequences of its institutions being allowed to converge with those of non-socialist market economies, and that China's economic structure at the start of reforms is a major explanation for the rapid growth. China had a high population density heavily concentrated in low-wage agriculture, a condition that was favorable for labor-intensive export-led growth in other parts of East Asia. The convergence school also holds that China's gradualism results primarily from a lack of consensus over the proper course, with power still divided between market reformers and old-style socialists; and that the “innovative” non-capitalist institutions are responses to China's political circumstances and not to its economic circumstances.

Perhaps the best test of the two approaches is whether China's policy choices are in fact leading to institutions harmonized with normal market economies or to more distinctive innovations. In this regard, the recent policy trend has been towards institutional harmonization rather than institutional innovation, suggesting that the government accepts that the ingredients for a dynamic market economy are already well-known.     

Relating inertia and experience in technology markets: an analysis of households’ personal computer choices

This article empirically analyses how households’ PC purchasing behaviours change with market experience. We find that: households generally exhibit inertia in their PC purchases, the level of inertia is increasing as a function of experience on the PC market, and, for households switching brands, the likelihood of buying a lesser-known brand increases with experience, regardless of the brand of the previous purchase. These findings are consistent with the predictions of a simple learning model, and extend our understanding of how market experience affects purchasing behaviour to an important technology product, with implications that may apply to other similar products.     

Antecedents to purchase intentions for Hispanic consumers: a ‘local’ perspective

The current study explores consumer attributes such as attitudes, subjective norms, connectedness, and price consciousness and their relationship with purchase intentions of Hispanic shoppers within the locally produced food category. Four hypothesized direct-path relationships and one moderation effect across the four proposed paths were tested via a two-step process in structural equations modeling. Results of measurement model testing suggested that a five-factor model fits well for the Hispanic group. Within the structural model process, a significant positive relationship was found between two proposed paths: consumer attitudes with intention to purchase and price consciousness with intention to purchase. A moderation effect of perceived product availability was found only for the path of price consciousness with intention to purchase. These results suggest that factors such as subject norms and connectedness, often associated with the local food category, may not be important drivers for purchase intentions for the Hispanic food shopper in retail grocery channels. However, other factors relating to attitudes, price consciousness, and product availability may be more salient. From this exploration, implications for marketers are provided and future research directions suggested.     

Aid and investment in LDCs: A robust approach

This paper uses panel data and the Local Linear Kernel Estimator (LLKE), to investigate the effects of aid on physical capital investment in developing countries. Specifically, we investigate the robustness of the relationship between aid and physical capital investment in Less Developed countries (LDCs) using two different measures of aid and five measures of the policy environment. We find that external aid has a positive and significant impact on physical capital investment given the support of the sample data we use. This effect is robust to the measurement of aid as well as the policy environment. However, the character of the positive relationship between aid and investment varies with the combination of the aid measure and the policy environment. We find that conditional on inflows, the better the policy environment, the higher the investment rate, all things being equal. The results have implications for aid research and aid policy.