Leadership, civility, and the 'No Jerks' rule

Nursing organizations and hospitals are not immune from the ravages of incivility. Toxic behavior can range from the very serious bullying and sabotage of very destructive people to the annoying and hard to cope behavior of just plain jerks. When a unit does not have a clearly defined "No Jerk" rule and infrastructure to support healthy behavior, communication suffers and errors occur. Nurse leaders have the opportunity of changing the self-interest behavior of jerks in our communities of caring.     

The Log of Gravity at 15

Portuguese Economic Journal - We review the contribution of “The Log of Gravity” (Santos Silva and Tenreyro, Rev Econ Stat 88:641–658, 2006), summarize the main results in the...     

Courage, leadership, and end-of-life care: when courage counts

As leaders, we must feel a sense of moral obligation to implement evidence about end-of-life care in our practice setting. Nurse leaders can help patients and families orchestrate a beautiful experience that is an alternative to futile, expensive end-of-life care. Preparation is key in helping staff provide the best level of care. A plan built around the best care for patients can integrate with many diverse positions and people. Courageous nurse leaders are well adapted to maneuvering through political traps and advocating for patients and their families. Everyone benefits personally and financially, including our communities and nation, when courageous leaders advocate successfully for effective end-of-life care.     

A landscape approach for assessing the biodiversity value of indigenous forest remnants: Case study of the Manawatu/Wanganui region of New Zealand

To halt the decline of biodiversity in New Zealand, the government has formulated a strategy of maintaining and restoring a full range of remaining natural habitats to a healthy functioning state. Many indigenous forest remnants exist on private land, and these could be utilised to increase biodiversity. Resources for conservation of forest remnants are limited, so they must be used wisely to deliver the greatest possible biodiversity gain. This paper presents a rapid method for valuing the biodiversity of a region's indigenous forest remnants to help prioritise conservation resources. The region is divided into environmentally distinct areas called land environments. A detailed land-cover map is derived from satellite imagery and used to estimate the proportion of natural habitats remaining in each land environment; from this the biodiversity value of any forest remnant may be calculated. The method is rapid and does not require detailed biodiversity information. When combined with conservation costs, it may be used to create a priority list of forest remnants for conservation. The Manawatu/Wanganui region of New Zealand is used as a case study to demonstrate the method.     

Biodiversity,natural resource accounting and ecological monitoring

The role that natural resource accounting and ecological monitoring can play in conserving biological diversity is discussed. There exists a widespread view that modifications to national income accounting procedures are crucial to the pursuit of sustainability and particularly the protection of biodiversity. However, we argue that the availability of biologically-adjusted national income figures would not, of itself, be likely to contribute significantly to the protection of biological resources. The conservation of biodiversity requires, among other things, a significantly improved understanding of the nature of environmental changes arising from imposed management regimes and the effects that these changes have on the persistence of biodiversity. On this basis, and in the context of sustainable development, we suggest that ecological monitoring should take priority over the generation of economic data.In many regions of the world sufficient ecological knowledge is available to design and implement integrated monitoring networks that can be used to track the status of many components of biodiversity and inform decisions taken over their management. We outline how this might be undertaken using a hierarchical and prioritised approach aimed, pragmatically, in the first instance at helping to preserve those ecosystems, communities and species which are perceived to be most threatened. Some emphasis is given to the Australian situation because it is the only rich megadiversity nation and it is at the forefront of the development of scientific techniques that can be used to help design soundly-based and cost-effective monitoring programs.We acknowledge the useful comments of two referees, and claim exclusive property rights in remaining errors.     

The global LeChatelier Principle and multimarket equilibria

LeChatelier (Comptes Rendus 99:786, 1884) and LeChatelier (Ann Mines 13(2):157, 1888) proposed that the adjustment of a physical system to a disturbance in its equilibrium was smaller as constraints are added to the adjustment process. Samuelson (Econometrica 28:368–379, 1960) showed that this Principle applied to a stable multimarket equilibrium for the case that all commodities are gross substitutes. We note that the Principle also applies to the stable equilibria of markets for which commodities can also be gross complements as formulated by Morishima (Osaka Econ Pap 1:101–113, 1952). Further, the Morishima and gross substitute cases are the only cases to which the Principle can apply, based only upon the stability hypothesis and a specification of the gross substitute/complement relations among commodities. We show that the Milgrom and Shannon (Econometrica 62:157–180, 1994) single crossing conditions specified for monotone comparative statics can be configured appropriate to the Morishima case to give global conditions for the LeChatelier Principle to apply to a multimarket equilibrium.     

Wechselwirkungen von Finanzkrise und Rechnungslegung

Praxis / MagazinTermine

Termine     

Estimation of trade and domestic distortions: an application to world agriculture

The world’s nations often produce commodities for which they have no apparent comparative advantage, and do so with techniques that are not particularly efficient by world standards. These inefficiencies may arise from various forms of trade and domestic distortions, as described in Chau et al., Int Econ Rev 44:1079–1095, (2003). We estimate these distortions for 33 countries of the world using a newly compiled data set. We find that domestic distortions tend to be slightly more important than trade distortions. For the average country, revenues in the agricultural sector would be 26% higher if domestic distortions were eliminated, but 21% higher if trade distortions were eliminated. Our measures of trade and domestic distortions across countries provide a complement to measures of protectionism such as producer subsidy equivalents.     

Capital market equilibrium with moral hazard and flexible technology

(Magill, M., Quinzii, M., 2002. Capital market equilibrium with moral hazard. Journal of Mathematical Economics 38, 149–190) showed that, in a stockmarket economy with private information, the moral hazard problem may be resolved provided that a spanning overlap condition is satisfed. This result depends on the assumption that the technology is given by a stochastic production function with a single scalar input. The object of the present paper is to extend the analysis of Magill and Quinzii to the case of multiple inputs. We show that their main result extends to this general case if and only if, for each firm, the number of linearly independent combinations of securities having payoffs correlated with, but not dependent on, the firms output is equal to the number of degrees of freedom in the firm’s production technology.