Using a balanced scorecard to improve the performance of an emergency department

The performance of the emergency department significantly improved after implementing the balanced scorecard including hours of continuing education attended by the staff, staff job satisfaction, the rate of incomplete laboratory tests within 30 minutes, the average monthly inappropriate return rate, and hospital profit. The results can assist administrators plan for the future. Although this was a pilot program for implementing a balanced scorecard in an emergency department, the indicators used in this study may also be reasonable for a hospital that has limited resources.     

International data on educational attainment: updates and implications

This paper presents a data set that improves the measurementof educational attainment for a broad group of countries. Weextend our previous estimates to 1995 for educational attainmentfor the population over ages 15 and 25. We also provide projectionsfor 2000. We discuss the estimation method for the measuresof educational attainment and relate our estimates to alternativeinternational measures of human capital stocks.     

An Intertemporal CAPM Approach to Evaluate Mutual Fund Performance

Merton (1973) and Campbell (1993) have demonstrated that if an investor anticipates information shifts, he will adjust his portfolio choice today in an attempt to hedge these shifts. Exploiting these insights, we construct a new performance measure to evaluate fund managers' hedging ability. This new measure is different from two widely adopted performance evaluation measures: securities selectivity and market timing. Moreover, an econometric methodology is developed to simultaneously estimate the magnitudes of these three portfolio performance evaluation measures. The results show that mutual fund managers are on average with positive security selection and negative market timing ability. Furthermore, the mutual funds with investment style classified as Asset Allocation generally have positive hedging timing ability.