Redirecting health care spending: consumer-directed health care

In an environment of rising health care costs, defined contribution plans and closely related consumer-directed health plans are emerging as a possible next phase in health plan development and offer new opportunities for the nursing profession.     

The recent behavior of Japanese imports: A disaggregated analysis

This study investigates the factors behind the recent surge in Japanese imports. It finds evidence of a rise in the long-run income elasticity of total real imports in the mid-1980s. The increase derives from similar behavioral changes at the end-use level and, to a lesser extent, major compositional shifts in the structure of Japanese imports. The behavioral changes in aggregate and end-use imports are likely to reflect important structural developments in the Japanese import market and have potentially significant implications for the impact of macroeconomic policies in Japan on future import performance.     

Employees' Nonwork Obligations and Organizational Commitments: A New Way to Look at the Relationships

The authors 1 adopted a family resource view of nonwork obligations and examined these obligations' relationships to dimensions of employees' organizational commitment. Complex interactions were found between employees' marital status, number of children, and having relatives nearby as related to the continuance dimension, but not the affective dimension, of commitment. In particular, results were strongest when the focus was on employees' perceptions of whether they would experience a high personal sacrifice if they were to leave their organizations. These findings are discussed in the context of developing family‐friendly human resource programs that may help employees feel less “trapped” in organizations. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Using guanxi-style buyer-seller relationships in China: Reducing uncertainty and improving performance outcomes

Recent marketing literature has recommended that companies employ either long-term relationship marketing or short-term transactional approaches to buyer-seller relationships depending on the value of the customer to the company. This article found that in China, guanxi-style buyer-seller relationships similar to relationship marketing were strongly related to reduced levels of perceived uncertainty about the business environment and a variety of improved performance outcomes. The use of transactional relationships was related to higher uncertainty and lower performance. The use of gifts and favors seemed more characteristic of transactional relationships and were not related to positive outcomes. Both quantitative evidence from American sellers and qualitative evidence from Chinese buyers supported these conclusions. It is argued that guanxi-style buyer-seller.     

Endogenous business cycles and systematic stabilization policy*

We study the effects of fiscal policy rules on the determinacy of rational expectations equilibrium in a perfectly competitive monetary model with constant returns. Government spending implies a distortion of the monetary steady state due to the implied taxation. We show that policy rules that let the GNP share of government spending depend sufficiently negatively on increases in GNP stabilize the economy with respect to endogenous fluctuations for arbitrarily little distortion of the steady state at which stabilization occurs. The rules do not involve lump‐sum taxation, negative income taxation, or exact knowledge of the economy's laissez‐faire steady state.     

Internalization v. Decentralization: An Analysis of Recent Developments in Pay Bargaining

It is commonly assumed, particularly within the human resource management literature, that decentralized bargaining, performance-related pay and individualized wage-setting arrangements represent a further extension of the internal labour market and a source of efficiency gains in production. Drawing on new data on company pay policies, this paper advances an alternative interpretation of recent innovations in pay and bargaining. It is argued that moves to fragment bargaining and reward systems threaten to undermine the organizational principles of internal labour markets and may, therefore, raise the costs of managing the employment relationship.