Quality of Education,Economic Performance and Institutional Environment

This paper addresses two questions. First, how does the quality, rather than the quantity, of education impact economic performance? Second, does the quality of education have a larger impact on economic performance in countries with better institutions (i.e., social and political variables which affect economic outcomes)? Using data from more than fifty countries, we observe that there is a positive relationship between the quality of education and GDP per capita. In addition, we find that the quality of education has a more beneficial effect on GDP per capita in countries with better law and order conditions, government stability, and overall institutional environment. These results remain unchanged under various scenarios.     

Hospital revenues in critical condition

As revenue growth declines among not-for-profit U.S. hospitals, Moody's anticipates challenges to revenue from the following: Medicare, Medicaid, commercial payers, patient volumes, uncompensated care, transition to ICD-10, fee-for-service and bundled payment.     

Perspective: Economic Conditions,Entrepreneurship, First‐Product Development,and New Venture Success*

Entrepreneurial ventures have a significant impact on new job creation and economic growth, but existing evidence indicates that most entrepreneurial ventures fail. This paper reports key insights from VENSURV, a new database that tracks the success and failure of ventures founded since 1998. Based on an analysis of 539 new ventures founded during the years 1991–2001, the following conclusions are reached. First, consistent with prior research, less than half of the 539 ventures survived more than two years. Second, economic downturns lead to higher failure rates for new ventures. Third, new venture success is highly correlated with first‐product success. Fourth, first‐product success is enhanced when those products are introduced into markets with emerging market needs but with established industry standards. Finally, first‐product and venture performance are significantly higher for products based on ideas that came from the founders. In addition, the most successful first products are based on ideas that reflect both technology development and an analysis of customer needs.     

Has e-marketing come of age? Modeling historical influences on post-adoption era Internet consumer behaviors

E-marketing evolved from a comparatively isolated group of “dot-com” firms to a mainstream marketing channel activity. This progress has also influenced customers and their “e-behavior” in the process. This study reviews the literature from information systems and marketing and uses meta-analysis to synthesize key findings. Three important insights emerged. From this exercise, a framework was developed integrating both perspectives, Marketing and IS empirical and conceptual literatures, enhancing the understanding of the customer “e-behavior” process by which attitudes, perceptions and evaluations interact to influence purchasing intentions. The analysis suggests also that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, the primary constructs of the technology acceptance model (TAM), continue to influence purchasing intentions in the post-adoption online context. Thus, the multi-disciplinary nature of online purchasing behavior was demonstrated, underscoring a need for both cross-disciplinary research and a more integrative and collaborative strategy for decision-makers and managers.     

Strategic partnerships and relationship marketing in healthcare

Despite repeated government policies to introduce market-orientation and customer-focus into the UK National Health Service, there is still much anecdotal evidence of unsuccessful policy implementation. In this article we investigate the attitudes of healthcare managers to one recent policy initiative based on partnership working that is intended to provide integrated and customer-focused service to patients. While acknowledging the tensions and dilemmas inherent in private sector marketing concepts, we argue that relationship marketing has considerable potential in public healthcare contexts, based on its advocacy of building relationships between providers and customers and between providers and their suppliers. Using the framework of relationship marketing we identify healthcare managers' concerns about the motives, effects and benefits of implementing partnership arrangements in two regions of the NHS. Through a longitudinal research design our findings suggest that while respondents' attitudes to partnership working and customer focus had become more positive after two years of policy implementation, they remain centred on the service process rather than the customers it serves. We discuss what still needs to be done to transform public healthcare from what is still a predominantly supplier and product-driven service to one that is truly relationship orientated.     

Gambling and credit: an individual and household level analysis for the UK

We explore the relationship between gambling and the use of credit at the individual and household levels using representative pooled cross-section data from the UK Expenditure and Food Surveys (EFS) (2001–2007). Gambling and the use of credit are shown to be positively correlated at the household level. We find that both the incidence and amount of gambling vary according to household income and the positive association between gambling and credit is stable across household income. It is also apparent that there is strong intra-household correlation in both gambling activity and the use of credit, with stronger relationships in lower income households.     

A note on the importance of overnight information in risk management models

This paper examines the economic value of overnight information to users of risk management models. In addition to the information revealed by overseas markets that trade during the (domestic) overnight period, this paper exploits information generated via recent innovations in the structure of financial markets. In particular, certain securities (and associated derivative products) can now be traded at any time over a 24-h period. As such, it is now possible to make use of information generated by trading, in (almost) identical securities, during the overnight period. Of the securities that are available over such time periods, S&P 500 related products are by far the most actively traded and are, therefore, the subject of this paper. Using a variety of conditional volatility models that allow time-dependent information flow within (and across) three different S&P 500 markets, the results show that overnight information flow has a significant impact on the conditional volatility of daytime traded S&P 500 securities. Moreover (time-consistent) forecasts from models that incorporate overnight information are shown to have economic value to risk managers. In particular, Value-at-Risk (VaR) models based on these conditional volatility models are shown to be more accurate than VaR models that ignore overnight information.