Supply chain risk management in India – practical insights

This paper reviews the supply chain risk management (SCRM) literature to identify as well as to discuss and elaborate on the impact and origin of major supply chain risk factors in an Indian context. Through a combination of existing literature and a survey instrument, we identify major SCRM issues including underlying supply chain risks and thereafter identify gaps, issues and opportunities for further research. SCRM has become a popular research topic, in part owing to increased globalisation of business. Moreover competitive factors such as shorter product life cycles, technological innovations and changing government policies have brought this topic more sharply into focus. We carried out a survey among Indian supply chain professionals, based on supply chain risk constructs developed from a literature review. Statistical analysis utilised exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to determine the major risk factors in the Indian supply chain sector. We found a range of supply chain risks prevalent in Indian supply chains, classified here as cultural, operational, infrastructure, economic, forecasting and supplier-related risks. However, for a variety of reasons and as discussed in the paper, the implications can vary considerably. Based on the findings we provide a future SCRM research agenda from an Indian perspective. As international supply chains increasingly have Indian partners and domestic firms within India seek to be globally competitive, the risks need to be better understood. This is the first detailed study on SCRM practices in an Indian context.     

Tax Incidence Analysis of Developing Countries: An Alternative View

Misleading conclusions can be drawn from studies of tax incidencethat ignore the special features of developing countries. Incorporatingthese features can sometimes reverse the incidence pattern oftaxes relative to what is often taken to be conventional wisdom.Even where patterns are not reversed, quantitative differencescan be substantial. The "newer" views of incidence have implicationsfor tax restructuring options being considered in several developingcountries. The proposed restructuring may appear to lead onlyto a more regressive tax system because of improper incidenceanalysis.     

银行盈利的宏微观因素——对中国银行业的实证研究

This paper seeks to examine the determinants of the profitability of the Chinese banking sector during the post-reform period of 2000–2005. The empirical findings from this study suggest that all the determinants variables have statistically significant impact on China banks profitability. However, the impacts are not uniform across bank types. We find that liquidity, credit risk, and capitalization have positive impacts on the state owned commercial banks (SOCBs) profitability, while the impact of cost is negative. Similar to their SOCB counterparts, we find that joint stock commercial banks (JSCB) with higher credit risk tend to be more profitable, while higher cost results in a lower JSCB profitability levels. During the period under study, the empirical findings suggest that size and cost results in a lower city commercial banks (CITY) profitability, while the more diversified and relatively better capitalized CITY tend to exhibit higher profitability levels. The impact of economic growth is positive, while growth in money supply is negatively related to the SOCB and CITY profitability levels.      

Determinants of Trade Misinvoicing

Trade misinvoicing should be seen as an element of de facto capital account openness. Traditional explanations for trade misinvoicing??high custom duties and weak domestic economies??are less persuasive in a world of high growth emerging markets that have low trade barriers. We construct a 53-country data set over a 26?year span, covering both industrialized and developing countries, to study the phenomena of export and import misinvoicing. Capital account openness, differentials in interest rates, political stability, corruption, indebtedness and the exchange rate regime are identified as factors related to misinvoicing.     

Impact of employees’ perceived threat of market competition on unethical marketing and selling practices: Moral disengagement and ethical leadership

This study draws on the social cognitive theory to examine the effect of perceived market competition on employees’ unethical marketing and selling practices. The boundary conditions associated with this relationship were examined, and we posit that perceived market competition is related to unethical marketing and selling practices through the mediating mechanism of moral disengagement. We further propose that ethical leadership moderates the relationship between the perceived threat of market competition, moral disengagement, and tendency toward unethical marketing and selling practices. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 387 employees working in the banking sector in Pakistan. Our results suggest that moral disengagement had a full mediation effect between the perceived threat of market competition and tendency of employees toward unethical marketing and selling practices. Moreover, ethical leadership moderated the relationship between moral disengagement and the tendency of employees toward unethical marketing practices. The research findings indicate that when field employees encounter threat perceptions due to market competition, they have a propensity toward engaging in unethical marketing and selling practices when they can activate moral disengagement. This study also found that ethical leadership negatively moderates the relationship of moral disengagement with employees’ tendency toward unethical marketing and selling practices.     

Listening to the patient voice: using a sentic computing model to evaluate physicians’ healthcare service quality for strategic planning in hospitals

Online physician reviews (OPRs), also known as electronic word of mouth, have become the primary source of information for patients while making health consultation decisions. However, different techniques to analyze these reviews by machines have not been frequently applied yet in this domain. In this study, a novel method for opinion mining is being proposed to fill the existing research gap, that is, a hybrid approach to sentic computing. This approach integrates artificial intelligence and semantic web techniques to implicitly analyze OPRs in order to evaluate patient perceptions of healthcare service quality. We develop our methodology by using the following three main tasks: (1) sentence-level topic spotting (a topic-analysis procedure) to extract major topics, (2) a sentic computing framework to perform concept-level sentiment analysis (polarity detection on the categorized sentences), and (3) root cause and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analyses to identify SWOT for healthcare organizations. Analyses results of 47,499 OPRs from the UK-based website (Iwantgreatcare.org) show that the proposed hybrid approach has accurately classified concept words to their corresponding topics, and it has also outperformed the similar other methods of topic extraction in the healthcare domain. The results also indicate that the proposed approach can better contribute to the overall performance analyses for healthcare organizations, which could help practitioners in improving service-quality measures based on the real voices of patients. The proposed model also provides a theoretical basis for formulating quality measures for the healthcare sector.

     

Real-world incidence and burden of adverse events among non-metastatic prostate cancer patients treated with secondary hormonal therapies following androgen deprivation therapy

Abstract

Aims: To describe the incidence and identify prognostic factors of central nervous system (CNS) adverse events (AEs) and any AEs (CNS, skin rash, or fracture) and evaluate the healthcare resource utilization (HCRU), direct medical costs, and therapy discontinuation associated with these AEs among non-metastatic prostate cancer (nmPC) patients who received secondary hormone therapies.

Methods and results: nmPC patients who had initiated secondary hormonal therapy with enzalutamide, bicalutamide, or abiraterone ≥1?year after androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) were identified in the MarketScan database. Survival analyses were used to describe the incidence of CNS or any AEs. Annual HCRU and costs were compared across patient groups (CNS AE vs no CNS AE; any AE vs no AE) using propensity score weighted generalized linear models. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards models were used to identify AE predictors and compare risks of discontinuation.

Results: The analysis included 532 patients who initiated secondary hormonal therapies, among whom 201 (38%) and 244 (46%) experienced a CNS AE and any AE, respectively. Median times to CNS AE and any AE from therapy initiation were 17.90 and 11.00?months, respectively. Predictors of any AE were any AE in the baseline period (≤6?months before starting therapy), Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) score (1 vs 0), surgical castration, and older age. Predictors of CNS AEs were CNS AE in the baseline period and CCI score (1 vs 0). CNS and any AEs were associated with significantly higher HCRU. CNS AEs were associated with significantly higher incremental total medical costs ($18,522). CNS AEs and any AEs significantly increased therapy discontinuation risk by 48% and 38%, respectively.

Conclusions: AEs increase the economic burden and therapy discontinuation among nmPC patients receiving secondary hormonal therapies subsequent to ADTs. These patients should be carefully evaluated for AEs to reduce therapy discontinuation, HCRU, and direct medical costs.     

Relating focus to quality and cost in a healthcare setting

Focus in healthcare has been heralded as the next frontier in improving its efficiency and efficacy (Herzlinger 2004). Focus takes several different forms, ranging from standalone specialty centers to a hospital that places a strategic emphasis on a clinical area. We adopt this latter perspective and define focus as a disproportionate emphasis on a particular clinical area in a hospital. We use secondary data from hospitals providing cardiology care in New York State to examine the relationship between focus and performance. We develop two measures of focus. Proportional focus is defined to be the proportion of cases treated in a particular clinical specialty. Expertise focus is defined to be specific evidence that a hospital has taken action to build expertise in treating diseases in that specialty. We operationalize hospital performance along cost and quality dimensions, and we use hierarchical regression to examine the impact of focus on performance. Our results indicate that proportional focus, but not expertise focus, is associated with better cost performance. Quality performance, on the other hand, was associated only with the interaction between proportional focus and expertise focus, which means that only hospitals exhibiting higher levels of both proportional and expertise focus achieve better quality performance. These findings support the notion that not only is focus important in healthcare, but also that researchers and practitioners need to recognize that relationships are contingent on the performance and focus measures used and thus, findings may not be generalizable from one metric to another.     

Performance of Cross Listed Dual-Class Firms: Evidence from Chinese Firms Cross Listed on US Exchanges

We compare operating and market performance of Chinese single- and dual-class firms cross listed on US exchanges. We find evidence in line with researchers who argue that a dual-class structure allows insiders to invest in long-term value-enhancing projects. We find that dual-class firms underperform prior to their initial public offering (IPO) and then improve and have better operating performance than single-class firms in the second year after IPO. We find that dual-class firms also have better market performance than single-class firms beginning in the initial year, which is contrary to the finding in most other studies. The reason for this might be that firms that list on US exchanges show a credible commitment to shareholder rights.