Operational efficiency vs clinical safety,care appropriateness,timeliness, and access to health care

Journal of Productivity Analysis - Health care systems face resource scarcity that may jeopardise their financial sustainability as well as the quality of delivered health care. In view of that,...     

WHEN OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE MATTERS: A REVIEW OF THE EFFECTS OF INVESTOR HORIZON ON CORPORATE POLICIES

This paper surveys the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies. While the desire to encourage long-term investor ownership is shared among managers, boards and policy makers, how greater long-term investor ownership benefits corporate decisions and ultimately firm performance is still under academic investigation. The contribution of this paper is twofold. The paper's first contribution is providing an up-to-date review of theoretical and empirical findings. This paper introduces the groups of long-term and short-term investors and the related classification methodologies and investor horizon proxies used to form them. It further reviews the determinants of an investor's horizon. Then, this paper organizes the literature on the impact of investor horizon on corporate policies around three main channels: the short-term pressure hypothesis, the monitoring hypothesis, and the catering hypothesis. The paper's second contribution is identifying six major challenges ahead that need to be addressed to improve the understanding of the impact of long-term (short-term) investor ownership on corporates policies. These challenges represent opportunities for further research.     

The Location Choices of Multinational Firms: The Role of Internationalisation Experience and Group Affiliation

This paper investigates whether location choices of multinational firms depend on their past export, import or Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) experience on foreign markets or the experience of other affiliated firms. Regardless of locations' characteristics, we find that exporting in a given country, and to a smaller extent importing from it, significantly increases the probability of investing in that particular country the following year. This preliminary exporting phase appears more important for firsttime investors. Moreover, location choices not only depend on the investor's own international experience, but also on the international experience of other affiliated firms: firms tend to invest in countries where the group already exports or owns a local affiliate. These last findings suggest the existence of coordinated strategies and/or information sharing between affiliated firms.     

Consumer purchase intentions for green products: Mediating role of WTP and moderating effects of framing

This research examines the role of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in the purchase decision process for a green product and investigates the moderating effects of two types of framing: price and ecological message claim. Using an experimental design, 262 participants were assigned randomly to one of nine conditions (3 price × 3 ecological message frames). The results reveal a mediating effect of WTP on the relationship between consumers' perceptions and purchase intentions. Furthermore, a price framed in aggregate terms reinforces the positive effect of WTP on purchase intention. The mere presence of an ecological message claim also enhances the relation between WTP and purchase intentions. This research proposes ways marketers can promote their green products. The results encourage the use of ecological messages and frames of prices in an aggregate form to enhance consumers' purchase intentions through WTP.     

Integration and search engine bias

We study the effects of integration between a search engine and a publisher. In a model in which the search engine (i) allocates users across publishers and (ii) competes with publishers to attract advertisers, we find that the search engine is biased against publishers that display many ads – even without integration. Integration can (but need not) lead to own‐content bias. It can also benefit consumers by reducing the nuisance costs due to excessive advertising. Advertisers are more likely to suffer from integration than consumers. On net, the welfare effects of integration are ambiguous.     

Ethnic Diversity,Political Stability and Productive Efficiency: Empirical Evidence from the African Countries

While ethnic diversity has been shown to produce numerous negative effects on the economic performance due to disagreement on the production of the public good, nepotism in making employment decisions, increased corruption and rent‐seeking behaviour, its positive effects appear to have received much less attention. We hypothesise and test several explanations why higher levels of ethnic diversity may be associated with better socio‐economic outcomes. We find that productive efficiency will be higher in the societies where ethnicities can benefit from the complementarity of skills. Incentives to engage in an ethnic conflict will be lower and the extent of political stability higher in those countries where the opportunity costs of ethnic conflict are more substantial. We also find some evidence in support of the political aspirations hypothesis that attributes the negative effects of ethnic diversity to the strife by ethnic groups for more political influence.     

Liquidity risk,price impacts and the replication problem

We extend a linear version of the liquidity risk model of Çetin et al. (Finance Stoch. 8:311–341, 2004) to allow for price impacts. We show that the impact of a market order on prices depends on the size of the transaction and the level of liquidity. We obtain a simple characterization of self-financing trading strategies and a sufficient condition for no arbitrage. We consider a stochastic volatility model in which the volatility is partly correlated with the liquidity process and show that, with the use of variance swaps, contingent claims whose payoffs depend on the value of the asset can be approximately replicated in this setting. The replicating costs of such payoffs are obtained from the solutions of BSDEs with quadratic growth, and analytical properties of these solutions are investigated.