The business organization,environment, and T-group training: A new viewpoint

T-Group training tends to be more effective in certain organizations facing dynamic environments than in other organizations facing stable environments; contingency theory, whose chief spokesmen are Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, helps to explain why training has met with varying degrees of success.     

Adherence to iron chelation therapy and associated healthcare resource utilization and costs in Medicaid patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia

Background:

Sub-optimal patient adherence to iron chelation therapy (ICT) may impact patient outcomes and increase cost of care. This study evaluated the economic burden of ICT non-adherence in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) or thalassemia.

Methods:

Patients with SCD or thalassemia were identified from six state Medicaid programs (1997–2013). Adherence was estimated using the medication possession ratio (MPR) of ≥0.80. All-cause and disease-specific resource utilization per-patient-per-month (PPPM) was assessed and compared between adherent and non-adherent patients using adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRR). All-cause and disease-specific healthcare costs were computed using mean cost PPPM. Regression models adjusting for baseline characteristics were used to compare adherent and non-adherent patients.

Results:

A total of 728 eligible patients treated with ICT in the SCD cohort, 461 (63%) adherent, and 218 in the thalassemia cohort, 137 (63%) adherent, were included in this study. In SCD patients, the adjusted rate of all-cause outpatient visits PPPM was higher in adherent patients vs non-adherent patients (aIRR [95% CI]: 1.05 [1.01–1.08], p?<?0.0001). Conversely, adherent patients incurred fewer all-cause inpatients visits (0.87 [0.81–0.94], p?<?0.001) and ER visits (0.86 [0.78–0.93], p?<?0.001). Similar trends were observed in SCD-related resource utilization rates and in thalassemia patients. Total all-cause costs were similar between adherent and non-adherent patients, but inpatient costs (adjusted cost difference?=??$1530 PPPM, p?=?0.0360) were lower in adherent patients.

Conclusion:

Patients adherent to ICT had less acute care need and lower inpatient costs than non-adherent patients, although they had more outpatient visits. Improved adherence may be linked to better disease monitoring and has the potential to avoid important downstream costs associated with acute care visits and reduce the financial burden on health programs and managed care plans treating SCD and thalassemia patients.     

Learning in Advance Selling with Heterogeneous Consumers

Advance selling occurs when consumers order a firm's product prior to the regular selling season. It reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyers and enables the firm to better forecast its future demand. The distinctive feature of this paper is that there are both experienced and inexperienced consumers, with the former knowing their valuations of the product in advance. We show that pre‐orders from experienced consumers lead to a more precise forecast of future demand by the firm and that the optimal pre‐order price may be at a discount or a premium relative to the regular selling price. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Electricity Forward Prices: A High-Frequency Empirical Analysis

We conduct an empirical analysis of forward prices in the PJM electricity market using a high‐frequency data set of hourly spot and day‐ahead forward prices. We find that there are significant risk premia in electricity forward prices. These premia vary systematically throughout the day and are directly related to economic risk factors, such as the volatility of unexpected changes in demand, spot prices, and total revenues. These results support the hypothesis that electricity forward prices in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland market are determined rationally by risk‐averse economic agents.     

The changing relationship between job loss announcements and stock prices: 1970–1999

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a sample of 4273 such announcements in 1160 large firms during the 1970–99 period collected from the Wall Street Journal. We note that the total number of actual announcements for the firms in our sample follows the business cycle quite closely. We then examine changes over time in standard summary statistics (means, medians, fraction positive) of the distribution of stock market reactions, measured by the cumulative excess returns (CER) of firms' stock prices over a 3-day event window centered on the announcement date, as well as changes over time in kernel density estimates of this distribution. We find clear evidence that the distribution of stock market reactions shifted to the right (became less negative) over time. One possible explanation for this change is that, over the last three decades, RIFs designed to improve efficiency have become more common relative to RIFs designed to cope with reductions in product demand. We estimate multivariate regression models of the CER controlling for the stated reason for the announced layoff, industry, and other characteristics of the announced layoff. We find that almost none of the decline in the negative average stock price reaction between the 1970s and 1990s can be explained by these factors.     

Harmonisation of food regulations and trade in the Single Market: evidence from disaggregated data

A structural gravity model is used to quantify the effect ofharmonisation of EU food regulations on intra-EU trade during1990–2001. We construct a database that identifies foodproducts covered by harmonised regulations at a very detailedlevel. We find, at different levels of aggregation, that harmonisationof food regulations has led to more intra-EU trade, and thatthe tariff equivalents of the cost of not harmonising food regulations,subject to the sub-sector elasticity of substitution, vary significantlyacross some food sub-sectors.     

Can hedging tell the full story? Reconciling differences in United States aggregate- and industry-level exchange rate risk premium

While the importance of currency movements to industry competitiveness is theoretically well established, there is little evidence that currency risk impacts US industries. Applying a conditional asset pricing model to 36 US industries, we find that all industries have a significant currency premium that adds about 2.47 percentage points to the cost of equity and accounts for approximately 11.7% of total risk premium in absolute value. Cross-industry variation in the currency premium is explained by foreign income, industry competitiveness, leverage, liquidity, and other industry characteristics, while its time variation is explained by US aggregate foreign trade, monetary policy, growth opportunities, and other macro variables. The results indicate that methodological weakness, not hedging, explains the insignificant industry currency risk premium found in previous work, thus resolving the puzzle that currency risk premium is important at the aggregate stock market level, but not at the industry level.