The HIPAA privacy rule and HR/benefits outsourcing: does the business associate label belong on your recordkeeper?

Employers that sponsor group health plans and serve as the plan administrator of those plans are required by the HIPAA Privacy Rule to execute business associate contracts with vendors that provide services on behalf of the plans. The business associate contracts must contain many specific provisions regarding the protection, use and disclosure of health information. This article looks at the implications of imposing business associate contract obligations on an integrated HR and benefits-outsourcing recordkeeper and cautions employers against an overly broad application of the requirements.     

Employment Decisions in Self-Directed Work Teams: A Regulatory Compliance Perspective

Organizations are increasingly relying on self-directed work teams (SDWTs) to accomplish organizational tasks. The introduction of SDWTs into the workplace poses a number of managerial challenges. This paper will focus on one such challenge, the continuing need to comply with labor and equal employment regulations. We discuss several factors that potentially affect the legal compliance process. These include: (1) the impact of an increasingly diverse workforce on individual behavior and team processes, and (2) the role of procedural justice perceptions in effective HR compliance management. We conclude with some practical solutions to the challenge of managing compliance in SDWT settings.     

The Walk‐down to Beatable Analyst Forecasts: The Role of Equity Issuance and Insider Trading Incentives*

It has been alleged that firms and analysts engage in an "earnings‐guidance game" where analysts first issue optimistic earnings forecasts and then "walk down" their estimates to a level that firms can beat at the official earnings announcement. We examine whether the walk‐down to beatable targets is associated with managerial incentives to sell stock after earnings announcements on the firm's behalf (through new equity issuance) or from their personal accounts (through option exercises and stock sales). Consistent with these hypotheses, we find that the walk‐down to beatable targets is most pronounced when firms or insiders are net sellers of stock after an earnings announcement. These findings provide new insights on the impact of capital‐market incentives on communications between managers and analysts.     

Taming hyperbolic growth

A simple modification of the hyperbolic growth model is proposed which results in close agreement with past and present population data but removes the singularity at the critical date. However, the values of the parameters in the model such as the population at the critical date cannot be estimated until the population deviates significantly from the simple model. The family of distributions suggested by this analysis may have other applications.     

Racial differences in consumer expenditure patterns, 1972–73

Summary and Conclusion In this paper, we have endeavored to analyze black-non-black differences in expenditure patterns as revealed by the 1972–73 BLS Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey Summary. Specific data shortcomings have been noted above. In addition, however, possible black-non-black differences in the propensity to misreport or withhold information may have affected the reliability of our findings. With these limitations in mind, the evidence of the survey data points to a main conclusion, namely, that although the “average” black consumer unit tended to spend a larger proportion of its after-tax income than the “average” non-black unit-just as the well-known stereotype implies-the statistical model underlying our analysis suggests that black consumer units with the same “characteristics” (after-tax income, family size, regional location, as well as the same age, education, and retired-nonretired status of family head) as the average non-black units tended to spend a smaller-not larger-proportion of their income than did the “comparable” non-black units. In addition, the model suggests that if Blacks maintained their own average characteristics but had the same “consumer behavior” as non-blacks, their APSp would rise substantially.