Long-term care insurance matures as a benefit

Forty-eight percent of U.S. businesses now offer long-term care insurance (LTCI) coverage, an increase of 15% since 1998. As more organizations realize the added value of LTCI in the employee benefit package, they have also found that motivation to buy varies with employee financial standing, gender and age, and that targeted employee education as part of retirement planning is essential.     

Businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century

This article analyses the proportions of personal to real estate wealth for a group of 295 businessmen profiled in the Dictionary of business biography . It shows that businessmen who owned land on a large scale in the late nineteenth century were a comparatively small group who retained a small proportion of their total wealth in landed assets. Low levels of social mobility are identified as a function of land purchase, and new insights are given into the relationship between wealth, status, and land ownership. Any integration of business and landed wealth in this period was not a consequence of businessmen becoming landowners.     

The german inflation 1914–1923 Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986, 369 pp.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not to be read as the views of either the Congressional Research Service or the Library of Congress.     

Abolish the Mortgage Subsidy

Ian Gow, Minister of Housing, is faced with a market massively distorted by subsidies and controls imposed at the whim of earlier politicians. Mortgage subsidies, coupled with rent controls, have virtually abolished the rented sector, and have encouraged (at the taxpayer's expense) owner-occupancy among groups which would probably have preferred to rent. Tom Taylor, of the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, argues that the current system reduces choice in housing and that the mortgage subsidy should be abolished, replaced for the less well-off by a housing voucher.     

A Game Model of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation

This paper explores the evolution of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) from 1988, when Australia first proposed it, to the present day. The analysis follows the tradition of the game theory of international politics and utilizes a variant of the scenario bundle mehod of Reinhard Selten (1977). The model explains APEC as an informal process rather than a full blown international organization, and why ASEAN is the decisive player in Pacific cooperation. An analysis of historical events since the creation of APEC leads to the hypothesis that an OECD style organization, which Australia had originally hoped for, will not be established in the foreseeable future.     

The influence of ‘low-balling’ on buyers' compliance: Revisited

Central to the low-ball strategy is the revocation and subsequent alteration of an integral part of an offer after a target subject accepts. Allegedly used to some extent in the automobile industry, it has drawn criticism as an unethical and characteristically deceptive practice. Yet, is such a strategy really effective in increasing customer compliance in real commercial settings? Using a sample of 160 subjects, the low-ball procedure was again tested. Although effective, its predicted superiority over several competing strategies was unconfirmed.     

A real-world way to manage real options

Each corporate growth project is an option, in the sense that managers face choices--push ahead or pull back--along the way. Yet many companies hesitate to apply options theory to initiatives such as R&D and geographic expansion, partly because these "real" options are highly complex. In this article, the authors make the case that the complexity of real options can be eased through the use of a binomial valuation model. Many of the problems with real-options analysis stem from the use of the Black-Scholes-Merton model, which isn't suited to real options. Binomial models, by contrast, are simpler mathematically, and you can tinker with a binomial model until it closely reflects the project you wish to value. Suppose your company is considering investing in a new plant. To use the binomial model, you must create an "event tree" to figure out the full range of possible values for the plant during the project's lifetime--next year, at the end of the design phase, upon completion. Then you work backward from the value at completion, factoring in the various investments, to determine the value of the project today. These calculations provide you with numbers for all the possible future values of the option at the various points where a decision needs to be made on whether to continue with the project. The authors also address another criticism of real options: that gaps often arise between theoretical and realized values of options of all types. Such gaps may be largely the result of managers exercising options at the wrong time. To improve the way it manages its real options, a company can look out for the decision trigger points that correspond to the nodes on a binomial decision tree. The trigger points should not only tell managers when they need to decide on exercise but also specify rules governing the exercise decisions.