Pledger modelling: Help the Aged case study

• The recruitment of pledgers (as a proxy for potential legators) to charitable organisations plays a vital role in their continued success, and as a percentage of all fundraising income generated it can represent substantial proportions. However, of all the ‘donation asks’ made of supporters, asking for a legacy is the most difficult. Therefore, it is important that the target audience should be as well researched and highly targeted as possible.
• Help the Aged had reached the stage where decisions need to be made about its future marketing in order to protect longer-term income. The findings of this legacy targeting project were to feed into communication programmes, direct marketing, and the overall legacy marketing strategy.
• The key objective was to identify the best prospects to mail a legacy ask to, across the supporter database, with the likelihood that they are going to pledge as a result.
• It was found that whilst tailored data analysis comes at a price, the average value of a legacy justifies the cost of using sophisticated targeting tools. However, because of the pledge-to-legacy time lapse, there will always be issues with measuring any long-term return on investment (ROI). Nonetheless, pledgers have to be taken on their word for the purpose of testing (and subsequent rollouts). Pledge data should be tested and the outcomes should inform legacy marketing. However, as mentioned above, pledgers necessarily need to be taken on their word and therefore, formulating models based on the type and/or value of pledges is not recommended.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bank stock returns and economic growth

Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking industry stock returns and future economic growth. Using dynamic panel techniques to analyze panel data from 18 developed and 18 emerging markets, we find a positive and significant relationship between bank stock returns and future GDP growth that is independent of the previously documented relationship between market index returns and economic growth. We also find that much of the informational content of bank stock returns is captured by country-specific and institutional characteristics, such as bank-accounting-disclosure standards, banking crises, enforcement of insider trading law and government ownership of banks.     

The effect of product diversification strategies on the performance of health insurance conglomerates

The conglomerate organizational structure of health insurers suggests two distinct methods of product diversification – the first is firm-level diversification, or diversification within individual affiliates, and the second is conglomerate-level diversification, or diversification across affiliates of the conglomerate. We hypothesize that using both firm- and conglomerate-level diversification may magnify the costs or benefits of diversification on the financial performance of the conglomerate. Our results confirm this hypothesis and suggest a positive relation between health insurer financial performance and the use of both product line diversification methods. Our results not only contribute to the body of literature related to corporate diversification but are also important to policymakers and all health insurance market participants as portions of the Affordable Care Act continue to be implemented.     

Can the Mortensen-Pissarides Matching Model Match the Business-Cycle Facts?

We examine whether the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model can account for the business-cycle facts on employment, job creation, and job destruction. A novel feature of our analysis is its emphasis on the reduced-form implications of the matching model. Our main finding is that the model can account for the business-cycle facts, but only if the average duration of a nonemployment spell is relatively high—about 9 months or longer.     

Endogenous Pollution Havens: Does FDI Influence Environmental Regulations?*

We suggest a novel perspective on the relationship between the stringency of environmental policies and foreign direct investment (FDI). We develop a political economy model with imperfect product market competition where local and foreign firms jointly lobby the local government for a favorable pollution tax. FDI is found to affect environmental policy, and the effect is conditional on the local government's degree of corruptibility. If the degree of corruptibility is sufficiently high (low), FDI leads to less (more) stringent environmental policy, and FDI thus contributes to (mitigates) the creation of a pollution haven. Our empirical results using panel data from 33 countries support the predictions of the model.     

半导体固定设备市场2008年出现高峰

对所有主流固定设备市场的预测认为,形势依然乐观。基于今年平稳至12％的增长预测,半导体固定设备市场产业分析师们对2006年和以后一个较短时期的固定设备前景谨慎乐观。     

The Zeitgeist of Futures?

This paper seeks the Zeitgeist of Futures from 1968 to the present. The primary effort is to discern the topics addressed by Futures over the years, how these have changed, what methods, time horizons, and moods are expressed. One goal is to shed light on questions such as whether FUTURES, or “futures studies” in general, anticipates the future or simply adds commentary on the present. If the former, by how much: if the latter, is the commentary useful? Another goal, assuming the answer is positive is to assess whether articles in FUTURES provide a “data base” for scenario building, modeling, or Delphi? Although the starting point addressed in this article is to explore trends in the use of vocabulary, and its correlations with “real world events” the goal is to comprehend connections and associations as revealed in FUTURES articles, as a step toward paradigm recognition and Zeitgeist.     

Self-enforcing stochastic monitoring and the separation of claims

A model of self-enforcing stochastic monitoring with investment and production is developed. The optimal contract leads to debt-like and equity-like claims on the firm that are held by symmetrically informed outside investors and rationalizes the separation of these claims in order to efficiently generate the correct monitoring incentives. Self-enforcing monitoring leads to misreporting in equilibrium. While stochastic monitoring means that the failure to repay the face value of the debt can lead to either monitoring and “bankruptcy,” or the acceptance of a reduced payment, which corresponds to a settlement agreement.     

Profits,Progress, and Poverty: Case Studies of International Industries in Latin America

Much has been written in recent years about the undue (and potentially adverse) emphasis of orthodox economics on GDP growth. Far less attention has been paid to the growing quantity bias in orthodox economics, and to the ever increasing fascination in broader society with numbers and quantitative data. We contend that the GDP growth bias is inextricably linked to the quantity bias and, moreover, that orthodox economics has catalyzed and reinforced this relationship of cumulative causation. In this context, we find instrumental valuation to be important both in helping identify the quantity bias and in critically analyzing and evaluating it.     

A comparison of treatment patterns,healthcare resource utilization,and costs among young adult Medicaid beneficiaries with schizophrenia treated with paliperidone palmitate or oral atypical antipsychotics in the US

Abstract

Background: Much of the burden associated with schizophrenia is attributed to its early onset and chronic nature. Treatment with once monthly paliperidone palmitate (PP1M) is associated with lower healthcare utilization and better adherence as compared to oral atypical antipsychotics (OAAs). This study aimed to evaluate real-world effectiveness of PP1M and OAA therapies among US-based adult Medicaid patients with schizophrenia, overall and among young adults aged 18–35 years.

Methods: Adult patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and at least two claims for PP1M or OAA between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2014 were selected from the IBM Watson Health MarketScan Medicaid Database. Treatment patterns and healthcare resource utilization and costs were compared between PP1M and OAA treatment groups following inverse probability of treatment (IPT) weighting to adjust for potential differences. Utilization and cost outcomes were estimated using OLS and weighted Poisson regression models.

Results: After IPT weighting, the young adult PP1M and OAA cohorts were comprised of 3,095 and 3,155 patients, respectively. PP1M patients had a higher duration of continuous treatment exposure (168.2 vs 132.5 days, p?=?.004) and better adherence on the index medication (proportion of days covered ≥80%: 19.0% vs 17.1%, p?<?.049). Young adults treated with PP1M were 37% less likely to have an all-cause inpatient admission (odds ratio [OR]?=?0.63, 95% confidence interval [CI]?=?0.53–0.74) and 33% less likely to have an ER visit (OR?=?0.67, 95% CI?=?0.55–0.81) compared to OAA young adult patients, but 27% more likely to have an all-cause outpatient office visit (OR?=?1.27, 95% CI?=?1.02–1.56). PP1M patients incurred significantly lower medical costs as compared to OAA patients.

Conclusions: Medicaid patients with schizophrenia treated with PP1M have higher medication adherence and have fewer hospitalizations as compared to patients treated with OAAs. PP1M may lead to reduced healthcare utilization and improved clinical outcomes.