The Responsible Shareholder

There is confusion about the ethical responsibilities of shareholders, including institutions, but a cool look at clarity of purpose can do much to dispel it. The author is a working philosopher who was Lecturer and a Fulbright Fellow at the London School of Economics and spent fourteen years as an investment banker before becoming a writer and independent consultant. She has lectured on business ethics at the London Business School, and has completed her first City mystery novel, Making a Killing .     

Volume and skewness in international equity markets

We examine the relation between trading volume and skewness in 11 international stock markets using daily and monthly data from January 1980 to August 2004. We construct single equation and VAR models of the relation between the first three moments of market returns and trading volumes. Our results show hitherto unrecognised channels of influence, and support the investor heterogeneity approach to explaining return asymmetries.     

A review of dental plans: PPOs and referral plans to dominate future

This important benefit has changed greatly in the last 20 years. Double-digit health care cost increases in the late 1980s caused indemnity plans to evolve into network plans, such as dental HMOs and PPOs. PPOs and referral or access plans now seem to be the plans of choice.     

Consumer involvement in health research: a UK scoping and survey

Consumer involvement or patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research is a UK policy imperative and a prerequisite for many funders. PPI in research is defined as research carried out with or being carried out by the public (or service users), rather than research on patients and public as subjects or participants. Despite the clear policy driver, there is relatively little empirical evidence on the extent, processes and impact of user involvement in research. This paper aims to add to the international evidence base on PPI in research by providing a key overview of current trends and impacts. In order to understand the current extent and variation of PPI in research, a scoping exercise and survey were carried out on selected UK studies. Six research topic areas (cystic fibrosis, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and public health) were selected to ensure a range of designs, study populations and histories of PPI in research. A total of 838 studies (non‐commercial studies and not older than 2 years) were contacted. The response rate for the scoping was 38% and the survey 28%. In the scoping, 51% of studies had some evidence of PPI and in the survey 79%. The most common PPI activity was steering committee membership and reviewing patient information leaflets. There appeared to be some blurred roles with patients participating as research subjects as well as carrying out patient involvement roles. A major finding was the limited amount of available information about PPI in publicly accessible research documents. We suggest that the invisibility of this type of involvement and the lack of routinely collected information about PPI results in a lack of shared understanding of what optimal PPI in a study should look like, with important implications for practice. Furthermore, without a framework to review PPI it is difficult to know if different approaches to PPI have a different impact on key outcomes of the research.     

The impact of PPS legislation on the systematic risk of hospitals

In 1983 the government passed legislation implementing a new method of paying hospitals for Medicare inpatient services, the Prospective Payment System (PPS). Under this system the changes in economic incentives to hospitals affected the market conditions under which hospitals operate. This article investigates the impact of PPS on the financial riskiness of hospitals. Using the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), this study analyzes the systematic risk of a portfolio of four publicly traded acute care hospitals in the pre-PPS and post-PPS periods, as well as four control portfolios. It covers a pre-PPS period from 1976 to the passage of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) and a post-PPS period through 1988. The systematic risk for publicly traded acute care hospitals increased significantly in the post-PPS period. However, the control groups also showed significant changes in systematic risk.     

‘The bull is half the herd’: property rights and enclosures in England, 1750-1850

Common fields reduced the transaction costs for commoners’ cow keeping by lowering the cost of insemination. After enclosure, cow keeping fell among small owners who, unlike large farmers, could neither jointly own the bull and the cow nor lease the male easily. The minimum acreage required to restore cow keepers to their pre-enclosure economic position indicates that many commoners who were given some land at settlement were inadequately compensated for the change in property rights.     

Regulatory science-Towards a sociological framework

The close relationship between scientific expertise and regulatory policy in certain controversial and public areas has prompted commentators to suggest the concept of ‘regulatory science’. However, definition is generally constrained either to the concerns of regulatory science or to its context. This paper proposes an approach to regulatory science which is both empirically-based and allows a more theoretical treatment of the new conditions of scientific and regulatory activity. A particular case-study of the British agrochemicals sector is presented in terms of a five-way analytical framework for regulatory science. The paper concludes by considering the wider relevance of regulatory science for future sociological and policy research.     

The last taboo?: surfacing and supporting Emotional Labour in HR work

The emotional challenges Human Resource Professionals (HRPs) face, and the work they do in managing emotion in day to day HR practice, have largely gone unacknowledged and unsupported and yet is arguably HR’s most value-added activity. Through in-depth interviews and diary study, we uncover the emotion handling aspect of HR work. Specifically we explore Emotional Labour (EL) which, despite its centrality to HR work, remains under-researched in the HR context. By asking our participants to recount and reflect on emotive interactions, we examine HRPs’ use of EL in their relational work; how they come to learn the emotion display rules of their role; the strategies they use to cope with such emotional demands and the factors that help/hinder this process. Our contribution is to ‘surface’ emotion in HR work and identify how organisations can prepare HRPs for, and support them in, their emotion handling efforts.