Strategic Partnership Between Private Organizations and Universities： The Search for Regional Development Through Solutions for Hospital Management

The public power and the private enterprise, the main agents of national economic and social development, when cooperating strategically, promote increased functional efficiency of their activities. In order to highlight the relevance of such partnership, this article aims to analyze the potential of actions jointly developed by private organizations and Brazilian universities. The research problem is lined in the field of health, which hosted actions developed between the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte （UFRN） and the Hospital Maternity Guiomar Fernandes （HMGF）, located in the city of Alexandria, in Rio Grande do Norte. The study emphasizes the shortcomings of this organization, the resolving power of the university in this scenario, and performs the analysis of the effects of this cooperation. The methodology used in this research was the case study in HMGF. With emphasis on fundraising and improving the informational management system, funding sources for projects of restructuring and expansion of the hospital were sought, as well as initiatives for developing hospital management softwares for small- and medium-sized organizations. As a result, the articulation between the university and the hospital provided the elaboration of a project for software development and the production of a project for physical restructuring and technological investment, aiming to expand the supply and quality of the hospital＇s services. The implementation of information systems, associated with investments in hospital infrastructure, providing increased efficiency in public assistance to the population, bringing both local and regional benefits, besides, providing the authorities with relevant data on the development of public policies.     

Hedging index exchange traded funds

This paper presents an empirical comparison of the out of sample hedging performance from naïve and minimum variance hedge ratios for the four largest US index exchange traded funds (ETFs). Efficient hedging is important to offset long and short positions on market maker’s accounts, particularly imbalances in net creation or redemption demands around the time of dividend payments. Our evaluation of out of sample hedging performance includes aversion to negative skewness and excess kurtosis. The results should be of interest to hedge funds employing tax arbitrage or leveraged long–short equity strategies as well as to ETF market makers.     

Allocation of Decision-making Authority

This paper addresses the question of what determines where in a firm’s hierarchy investment decisions are made. We present a simple model of a CEO and a division manager to analyze when the CEO will choose to allocate decision-making authority over an investment decision to a division manager. Both the CEO and the division manager have private information regarding the profit maximizing investment level. Because the division manager is assumed to have a preference for “empire”, neither manager will communicate her information fully to the other. We show that the probability of delegation increases with the importance of the division manager’s information and decreases with the importance of the CEO’s information. A somewhat counterintuitive result is that, in some circumstances, increases in agency problems result in increased willingness of the CEO to delegate the decision. We also characterize situations in which the CEO prefers to commit to an allocation of authority ex ante, instead of deciding based on her private information. Finally, even though the division manager is biased toward larger investments, we show that under certain conditions, the average investment will be smaller when the decision is delegated. These results help explain some findings in the empirical literature. A number of other empirical implications are developed.We thank Sudipto Dasgupta, Wouter Dessein, Jeff Ely, Mike Fishman, Ehud Kalai, John Matsusaka, Canice Prendergast, Chester Spatt, Lars Stole, Jan Zabojnik, two anonymous referees, participants at the 2002 Utah Winter Finance Conference, the 2002 European Finance Association Annual Meetings, the Harvard/MIT Organizational Economics Workshop, the 2002 University of Illinois Bear Markets Conference, and workshops at the University of Chicago and USC for helpful comments. Financial support from the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business is gratefully acknowledged.     

Relative productivity growth and the secular “decline” of U.S. manufacturing

There has been considerable debate about the causes of the “decline” of U.S. manufacturing over the post-war period. We show that the behavior of employment, prices and output in manufacturing relative to services over this period can be explained by a two-sector growth model in which productivity shocks are the only driving forces. Household preferences turn out to play a key role in our model. The data are consistent with a specification where households are unwilling to substitute goods for services (the estimated elasticity of substitution is statistically indistinguishable from zero), so the economy adjusts to differential productivity growth entirely by re-allocating labor across sectors.     

Ma and Sun on Insider Trading Ethics

Ma and Sun have recently argued that some forms of insider trading are ethically acceptable. We argue that the authors fail to prove three key premises of their argument, which is therefore unsound.