The non‐professionally affiliated (NPA) worker as co‐producer of public services: how is the role experienced in UK mental health services?

Recent workforce reforms have led to the widespread expansion of non‐professionally affiliated (NPA) support and assistant roles within UK public services. Research into these roles has been confined to a limited range of settings, with a focus on the consequence of change for professional workers. This article explores the emergence of ‘co‐production’, whereby NPA workers contribute alongside the professional in a distinct, complementary way. Findings are drawn from semi‐structured interviews with frontline workers and managers within the context of mental health workforce reform. The results build a picture of NPA working life characterised in part by autonomy and responsibility. At the same time, NPA workers rely on colleagues for support and are subject to being used indirectly by professionals. Contextual influences are considered. The conceptual implications of the analysis are brought out, both for the NPA role itself and for the broader issues involved in front line service work.     

A Unified Theory of Underreaction, Momentum Trading, and Overreaction in Asset Markets

We model a market populated by two groups of boundedly rational agents: "newswatchers" and "momentum traders." Each newswatcher observes some private information, but fails to extract other newswatchers' information from prices. If information diffuses gradually across the population, prices underreact in the short run. The underreaction means that the momentum traders can profit by trend-chasing. However, if they can only implement simple (i.e., univariate) strategies, their attempts at arbitrage must inevitably lead to overreaction at long horizons. In addition to providing a unified account of under- and overreactions, the model generates several other distinctive implications.     

Optimal partnership contracts: Foundation and duality

We use the duality in linear programming to solve the problem of optimal contracts with moral hazards. We show the importance of allowing the partners to throw away outputs under some contingencies. A two-step procedure is used to find the optimal contracts. The first step minimizes the loss from undistributed outputs, and in the second step, a second best solution is found. A characterization of the optimal contracts in two-by-two-by-two partnership games is offered. Such contracts implement an optimal strategy profile that either has no incentive cost to implement or is near a pure strategy profile.     

THE FISCAL CHALLENGE OF COMPETITIVE MARKETS

Competition maximises consumer satisfaction but creates a financial problem for enterprises. When prices are competed down to just cover marginal costs, part of the value added by the enterprise is externalised. Government has not been efficient at recycling that value back into the economy, which is why infrastructure is severely underfunded.     

Management Accounting Education In Australian Universities: A Review Of The Current State

The teaching of management accounting at tertiary institutions drew criticism in the mid-to-late 1980s on the grounds that course content and teaching methods were not keeping pace with changes in manufacturing technologies and the business environment. A study of management accounting programs in 30 Australian universities shows that the criticisms are largely being addressed, with most programs being well up-to-date in their coverage of many of the new topics and practices that have emerged in management accounting in recent years. Nonetheless, management accounting educators continue to see a number of constraints on effective teaching in this area.     

Pre-positioning for effective resolution of bank failures

Large bank failures are often handled differently to other firm failures because suddenly closing a large bank and consequently freezing otherwise liquid claims raises financial stability concerns. As a result, substantial public funds are often used as part of the resolution process, which can undermine market discipline and longer-term financial stability. We propose a resolution scheme that enables the good portion of creditors’ claims to be quickly made available to them in way that maintains market discipline while managing the liquidity effects of large bank failures. We report on a New Zealand study into making the scheme work in practice.     

Social Interaction and Stock-Market Participation

We propose that stock‐market participation is influenced by social interaction. In our model, any given “social” investor finds the market more attractive when more of his peers participate. We test this theory using data from the Health and Retirement Study, and find that social households—those who interact with their neighbors, or attend church—are substantially more likely to invest in the market than non‐social households, controlling for wealth, race, education, and risk tolerance. Moreover, consistent with a peer‐effects story, the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock‐market participation rates are higher.     

The importance of level 1 trauma services in U.S. hospitals

In this quantitative research study, the organizational characteristics, market factors, and profitability of U.S. acute care hospitals that provide the highest intensity of trauma services are assessed. Results indicate these hospitals are larger, have a higher occupancy rate, higher expenses per discharge, and a lower length of stay. Hospitals with Level 1 trauma centers have a positive return on assets. The study has managerial implications associated with individual hospital performance and policy implications on resource allocation.