Ownership structure and hospital service costs and fees: A decomposition approach

This paper analyzes hospital characteristics that are associated with higher average costs and charges for venipuncture, computed tomography procedures (computerized axial tomography [CAT] scans), and electrocardiograms (EKG). Using data from a Medicare database, our results indicate that higher wages, larger hospital sizes, and greater service quality are associated with higher procedure costs, whereas system membership is generally associated with lower procedure costs. Blinder‐type decompositions, which are the main focus of this study, suggest (a) that venipuncture costs are about 17% to 19% lower at proprietary hospitals than at nonprofit or government hospitals, (b) CAT scan costs are about 6% to 12% lower at nonprofit hospitals than at proprietary and government hospitals, and (c) that EKG costs are about 3% lower at proprietary hospitals than at nonprofit or government hospitals. Lastly, large portions of each of these differences are found to be due to both differences in mean values of the hospitals' characteristics by ownership type and differences in the mechanism by which the hospitals' characteristics are transmitted to procedure costs.     

Experienced and Novice Investors: Does Environmental Information Influence Investment Allocation Decisions?

Economic Value Added (EVA) is a performance measure that is being used by an increasing number of companies, but academic research on EVA is limited. In addition, all prior empirical academic studies on EVA have used the firm as the unit of analysis. In this study, we examine the effect of EVA on the performance of individual managers. Specifically, we examine whether managers on EVA-based bonus plans outperform managers on traditional accounting-based bonus plans. We are able to test this because we have access to an EVA-focused company that has managers on both EVA and traditional bonus plans. Our results suggest that managers on EVA bonus plans who understand the EVA concept perform better than managers on traditional bonus plans. However, we find some evidence that the increase in performance results from increased consistency or congruence in the manager's evaluation–reward process rather than from superiority of EVA as a performance measure. Also, we find that the effect of EVA bonuses and EVA understanding differs depending on the area of the firm in which the manager is employed. This suggests that EVA may not be a universally appropriate base for reward systems. *Mohan Lal passed away 24 July 2002. This paper is dedicated to him.     

An integrative model of e-learning use: Leveraging theory to understand and increase usage

Employees are increasingly using technology to access content for learning, and theory development has been outpaced by practice. Drawing on a well validated theory of behavior change (the Transtheoretical Model of Change), as well as theories on technology acceptance and employee development, this paper offers an integrative model of factors that influence employee use of e-learning as well as practical recommendations for how use might be increased. Recommendations for future research on e-learning are also offered.     

Jointly Optimal Taxes and Enforcement Policies in Response to Tax Evasion

Assuming the government cannot fully observe either individual types or incomes and jointly picks optimal taxes and audit policies against evasion can significantly alter standard results from optimal income taxation and tax‐evasion models, which treat these separately. We consider this when individuals differ in their risk preferences and incomes. Given the resulting complexity, supplementing analytic results with numerical analysis helps explain the structure of the resulting policies and how they change when the distribution of income or the revenue requirements of the government change. We do this analysis with and without audit errors and with incomes exogenous or affected by occupational choice.     

Groupware adoption in a distributed organization: transporting and transforming technology through social worlds

In this paper, we draw on theory from social worlds to analyze how different organizational contexts affect groupware adoption. We report on a study of the adoption of data conferencing in a large distributed organization. Our data show that the diffusion process, which was driven by the users, was a result of communication and transformation of the technology across different social worlds. We also discovered that membership in multiple social worlds in an organization creates a tension for the potential adopter who is in a distributed team. To function effectively, team members must uniformly adopt the technology, yet some may face resistance from other social worlds to which they belong. Our study showed that adoption was affected by organizational sites having conflicting views of the value of collaboration, different amounts and needs for resources, and different acceptance of technology standards. Potential technology adopters on distributed teams are faced with conflicting loyalties, constraints, and requirements between their distributed collaborations and organizational homes.     

The microstructure of exchange rate management: FX intervention and capital controls in Brazil

This article uses a microstructure approach to analyse the effectiveness of capital controls introduced in Brazil to counter an appreciation of the Real. Based on a rich data set from the Brazilian foreign exchange market, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to characterize the interaction of the central bank, financial and commercial customers in times of regulatory policy measures. We find that capital controls change market participants’ behaviour, and that central bank interventions elicit a significant response in financial order flow. Referring to the source of order flow, we find no direct price impact by financial flows and thus no evidence that the appreciation of the Real is driven by financial customers’ activity. Instead, commercial customers seem to be a primary driver of the Real within our model.     

Housing tenure choice and the dual income household

Housing tenure choice has been the subject of a very large literature. Many treatments have sought to estimate the effect of household income on the likelihood of home ownership. To date, no study has ever disaggregated the household income of married couples into the separate labor income components to see if one partner’s income has a different effect than the other. Using a derived likelihood function to control for censoring in the wife’s income, this paper estimates the effect of separate incomes on housing tenure choice, accounting for possible endogeneity of the wife’s income. To compare the results of this estimation method, the paper also estimates the standard IV models, 2SLS and IV probit. While the results show that there is no endogeneity of the wife’s income, ignoring the censoring of the endogenous variable (when a large fraction of observations are censored) can possibly lead to biased coefficient estimates. Also, this paper confirms the importance of total household income, which has a larger effect than the total disaggregated components.     

Have Employment Relationships in the United States Become Less Stable?

There has been considerable debate as to whether job stability has declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the incidence of labor market turnover between 1986 and 1993. Specifically, we calculate one- and two-year separation rates and then analyze turnover by the source of separation. We find that the incidence of job separations did not increase over the period under investigation, but appears to have declined somewhat. When analyzing separations by reason, conditional on separating from an employer, we find little evidence of temporal changes in the composition of turnover that would indicate greater employment instability. Therefore, we do not find conclusive evidence that employment relationships have become more unstable in the recent past.