Spanish healthcare public private partnerships: The ‘Alzira model’

Global infrastructure reports suggest that, in the wake of the fiscal crisis, healthcare PPPs are seen as a growing area as governments switch attention to social welfare projects. Spain is unique in having had a PPP hospital in operation for over a decade which is funded through a capitation fee. This paper takes a critical approach to evaluate this project, with our analysis showing that the original project could never have been viable and that the renegotiation of the contract has been costly to the government. Viewing the contract through a financialised lens we can see how this contract has been used to ‘make up’ a market for the private delivery of public healthcare in Spain. We also call into question the role of the Spanish savings banks in financing this type of project, which has now been replicated with further hospitals in Spain and Portugal, as well as in developing countries such as Lesotho.     

An optimal incentive scheme for planning with targets

In socialist economies incentive schemes that contain targets are useful to planners since planners must allocate output to various users. We use a principal-agent model to show that under certain circumstances a first-best Pareto-optimal incentive scheme containing a target exists.     

The Importance of Experimental Control in Testing the Impact of Interviewer Continuity on Panel Survey Nonresponse

The conventional wisdom in survey research suggests that it is advisable to have the same interviewers return to the same respondents in order to maintain good response rates in longitudinal surveys. There has been, however, very little documented experimental research to support this. Work conducted by Campanelli and O'Muircheartaigh (1999) using a subsample of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) at Wave 2 with experimental control of the allocation of respondents to interviewers showed no evidence of a positive continuity effect on nonresponse; more extensive analysis by Laurie et al. (1999) of the full BHPS sample using Waves 2 through 4 presents contradictory results. This paper extends the earlier analysis and shows that these differences in findings are due to the lack of experimental control for the inferences from the full BHPS sample in the Laurie et al. (1999) report rather than the shorter time frame considered in Campanelli and O'Muircheartaigh (1999). This paper also considers variation in interviewer continuity effects across areas through the use of multilevel statistical models.     

Collectivism,individualism, and outgroup cooperation in a segmented China

A consistent theme in cross-cultural management research is that collectivists are more cooperative than individualists. We use Hofstede's measure for individualism–collectivism and combine it with an experimental measure of cooperation to test this relationship in China. In contrast to the established paradigm, we find that groups with higher individualistic scores are more cooperative than those groups with higher collectivistic scores. We attribute these results to groups being composed of outgroup members. In addition, we find that subjects from the more developed coastal area are more individualistic and cooperative than are subjects from inland China.

The 1999 Small Employer Retirement Survey

Abstract

In this article we examine to what extent policyholders buying a certain class of participating contracts (in which they are entitled to receive dividends from the insurer) can be described as standard bondholders. Our analysis extends the ideas of Biihlmann and sequences the fundamental advances of Merton, Longstaff and Schwartz, and Briys and de Varenne. In particular, we develop a setup where these participating policies are comparable to hybrid bonds but not to standard risky bonds (as done in most papers dealing with the pricing of participating contracts). In this mixed framework, policyholders are only partly protected against default consequences. Continuous and discrete protections are also studied in an early default Black and Cox-type setting. A comparative analysis of the impact of various protection schemes on ruin probabilities and severities of a life insurance company that sells only this class of contracts concludes this work.     

Environmental context,managerial cognition,and strategic action: an integrated view

This study addresses an apparent disconnect between two views of strategic action: the ‘economic view,’ which contends that industry structure is the primary influence on strategic action, and the ‘cognitive view,’ which suggests that managerial cognition drives strategic action. We argue that this disconnect has created artificial boundaries between the two perspectives and has limited our ability to develop holistic explanations of strategic action. In response, we develop an integrated model that answers two questions: 1) Does industry context affect managerial cognition? 2) Does managerial cognition mediate the relationship between industry context and strategic responses to environmental changes? To examine these questions, we study the relationship between industry velocity, the structure of top management's cognitive representation of the environment, and the speed of response to environmental events. We find that industry velocity influences the structure of cognitive representations, which in turn influence the speed of response to environmental events. These results support our contention that both industry and cognition variables are critical in developing explanations of strategic actions. These results have implications for our understanding of the development of top managers' beliefs, the relationship between beliefs and action, and the nature of the complex relationship between industry context, managerial cognition, and strategic action. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social responsibility and personal success: A research note

Views of corporate social responsibility recognize thatindividual decision makers are key to implementing socially responsible programs and that it is difficult to ask executives to act in a socially responsible manner if such actions have a negative impact on personal success. Using a sample of more than 300 advertising executives, the compatibility of social responsibility and personal success are explored by examining the relationship between social responsibility and advertising executives’ incomes and titles. Findings indicate that neither penalties nor rewards accrue to advertising executives for socially responsible actions. Implications for executives wanting their organizations to be viewed as socially responsible are discussed.