FINANCIAL INNOVATIONS IN LEVERAGED COMMERCIAL LOAN MARKETS

In the last decade, three innovations in commercial loan-based securities and derivative have enabled institutional investors to access commercial loan markets on leveraged terms : collateralized loan obligations (CLOs); loan-based total return swaps; and leveraged loan-based structured notes (LLSNs). These innovations have been driven by a combination of structural changes in the banking industry, enhanced technology for securitizations, reformed banking regulations, and the advent of credit derivatives.
Besides providing new investment opportunities for institutional investors, these recent innovations in loan markets also promise to reinforce the existing trend in banking away from financial intermediation and toward information intermediation. Such a trend, the authors argue, is helping to ensure the long-run viability of commercial banks. By transforming loan assets in the ways described in this article, banks can generate fee income instead of interest income (thus limiting their capital requirements and interest rate and credit exposures) while still exploiting their comparative advantage in credit analysis and monitoring.     

An analysis of the cost of providing ancillary services to skilled nursing facility patients in New York State

Currently, nursing homes can arrange for the provision of ancillary services either by providing the services directly, purchasing the services through contracts and fees, or by outside billings, in which the services are supplied by other providers who then bill Medicaid directly. Frequently, some combination of these three modes of provision is used for each ancillary service. The purpose of this study is to explore ancillary costs in a sample of nursing homes and to determine, to the extent possible, the most cost-efficient means of providing selected ancillary services (physical therapy, radiology and medical staff services). Prior to examining the impact of the mode of provision on cost levels, other facility and patient characteristics that might justifiably affect costs are identified and adjusted for. The results demonstrate that outside billing or purchasing services can be much less expensive than providing the services directly. It is suggested that all ancillary services (outside billings as well as services provided directly through contracts and fees) be included when facility-to-facility cost comparisons are made. This approach should serve as an incentive for nursing homes to seek the most cost-efficient means of providing ancillary services.     

Review of Financial Reporting and Global Capital Markets: A History of the International Accounting Standards Committee, 1973–2000

This review of K. Camfferman and S. A. Zeff, Financial Reporting and Global Capital Markets: A History of the International Accounting Standards Committee, 1973–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) provides an overview of the work, comments on the authors' approach to the history of the IASC, and comments on the book's contribution to our understanding of the IASC and its place in global financial governance.     

What are the implications of the new UK age discrimination legislation for research and practice?

Forthcoming changing demographics and the introduction of the relatively recent UK age discrimination legislation make it timely to consider some of the debates around the relevance of age to work. Issues surrounding ageing have been considered from within a number of disciplines and research perspectives which have led to some questioning of the dominant economic model that pivots on chronological age as a convenient, bureaucratic, measure that proxies for ability. The role of the HR practitioner in being able to redefine expectations throughout the lifespan of employees is considered while constraints to managing for the longer term are acknowledged. It is proposed that although the legislation will affect some age‐related practices positively, there are likely to be unintended consequences that single out particular age groups as special cases and therefore make age more relevant to the work relationship.     

‘Everybody's talking at me’: the dynamics of information disclosure and consultation in high‐skill workplaces in the UK

This article examines the dynamics of direct and indirect consultation processes in three high‐skill work establishments in the UK. Drawing on a mix of case study survey and interview data, it analyses the experiences and attitudes of predominantly well‐qualified professional employees. Adopting the concept of ‘embeddedness’ of employee consultation at the workplace level, we find that despite considerable breadth and depth of practice, many employees remain dissatisfied with the extent of their individual and collective influence over management decision‐making processes. Four underlying contributory factors are presented: extant hierarchical and bureaucratic management styles, the negative impact of work overload, the individualisation of consultation through computerisation, and the weakness of cooperative forms of union engagement.     

Proper scoring rules for general decision models

If a decision maker whose behavior conforms to the max-min expected utility model is faced with a scoring rule for a subjective expected utility decision maker, she will always announce a probability belonging to her set of priors; moreover, for any prior in the set, there is a scoring rule inducing the agent to announce that prior. We also show that on the domain of Choquet expected utility preferences with risk neutral lottery evaluation and totally monotone capacities, proper scoring rules do not exist. This implies the non-existence of proper scoring rules for any larger class of preferences (CEU with convex capacities, multiple priors).