DEFERRED FEES FOR UNIVERSITIES

Each English university should be allowed to introduce its own ‘deferred fees’ on top of the existing national funding structure. Each graduate would only have to pay these fees to its university if their income rises beyond the point of paying off their maintenance and state tuition loans. I show these new fees are fiscally neutral, highly progressive and have no impact on the state or the financial position of the universities which do not introduce such fees. They have the potential to provide a long‐run solution to the repeated underfunding of undergraduate education at a number of English universities and reduce the fiscal pressure the state is under.     

The Impact of Risk Management Standards on Patient Safety: The Determinants of MRSA Infections in Acute NHS Hospitals, 2001–08*

We study a key part of National Health Service (NHS) policy to ensure high‐quality health care: failure to supply such care cost the NHS £787m in clinical negligence payouts during 2009–10. The NHS uses risk management standards to incentivize care, and we examine their effects on methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections. Using a specially assembled data set, our GMM results suggest that improvements in the risk management standards attained by some hospitals are correlated with reductions in their MRSA infection rates. Moreover, the exogeneity of this relationship cannot be rejected for higher risk management levels, suggesting attainment of higher standards was instrumental in reducing infection rates.     

Translation and convergence in projects: An organizational perspective on project success

A range of theories (actor‐network theory, multinodality, and sense making) are drawn together into a single model of project management processes in order to discuss project success and failure. It is argued that success and failure can be characterized in terms of a continuum between project convergence and divergence. The causes of divergence and convergence are discussed with reference to the above theories using four illustrative case studies.     

The returns to formality and informality in urban Africa

This paper addresses the questions as to the size and causes of earnings differentials in two urban African labor markets, those of Ghana and Tanzania. We have panel data so we can ask how far time invariant unobservables, market ability for short, matters in the determination of earnings. We also have information on whether the individual is own self-employed, self-employed with employees, a private or public sector wage employee and the size of the enterprise in which wage employees work or which the self-employed owns. We find, mirroring work on developed economies, that unobserved individual market ability is by far the most important factor explaining the variance of earnings. With controls for such ability the gap between private wage employment and civil servants is about 50%. With controls for enterprise size we find that wage employees earn the same as the self-employed in both Ghana and Tanzania. Enterprise size matters. At most half of the OLS effect of size on earnings can be explained by unobservable ability. Workers in the largest firms are the high earners with wage rates which exceed those of civil servants. These results all assume exogenous movement. We find evidence that endogeneity bias may be serious and may be understating the extent of both the size effect and the private sector wage (negative) premium. The implications of our results for understanding the nature of formal and informal employment in Africa are discussed.     

On the prevalence of trends in primary commodity prices

This paper applies new time series procedures to examine the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis of a secular deterioration in relative primary commodity prices. Specifically, we allow for (up to) two structural breaks in 24 price series, covering the 1900–98 period. For the majority of commodities, it is shown that the trend is not well represented by a single downward slope, but instead by a shifting trend that often changes sign over the sample period. Unlike some recent work that has also allowed for structural breaks, these results provide much less support for the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis.     

Do Hispanic immigrants spend less on medical care? Implications of the Hispanic health paradox

ABSTRACT

The literature of the Hispanic heath paradox has found that in the U.S. Hispanic immigrants have better health than U.S. natives, even though they tend to have lower socioeconomic status. The main objective of the current study is to investigate whether Hispanic immigrants also use less medical care goods and services. Main contributions of the article include using a data set of older Americans from the Health and Retirement Study covering the period from 1992 to 2012 as well as using three new measures of health, rather than the more common use of morbidity or mortality. We estimate the impact of relevant factors including health, race, and immigrant status upon five different measures of healthcare usage. Even though Hispanic immigrants do have lower mean levels of most measures of healthcare usage, when controlling for other factors in our regressions we find some evidence of increased healthcare usage for Hispanic immigrants. Increased health care utilization may be one explanation for the Hispanic health paradox.