Dispersed alarm systems – a review

The increase in the number of retired, elderly and very old in society has begun to pose the problem of how to provide access to care services for those in households which are not purpose built, specially adapted and serviced accommodation. Liberalization of telecommunications in the U.K. allied to technical advances have allowed ‘dispersed alarm systems’ to be developed and thus provide a means of communication between isolated elderly people in distress and a central emergency service. The selection of an appropriate system and its management are discussed in this paper.     

PURPOSE-BUILT RETIREMENT HOUSING FOR SALE

Sheltered housing for the elderly has traditionally been provided by local authorities and charitable organizations but it seems that they can no longer meet the housing needs of this group. In the last few decades, there has been a significant rise in home-ownership amongst retired people. Two features of this are important. First, those retired people who have been used to owning their own homes may be unwilling to consider somewhat institutional types of housing. Second, as a group, although eligible for specialist retirement housing provided by local authorities and charitable agencies, elderly owner-occupiers find it nearly impossible to qualify for such accommodation as they are not considered to be in need. Recently there has been a move by the private sector to provide purpose-built accommodation for sale to the elderly. How far the needs of the elderly can be met by this type of housing was investigated in two related studies. The first involved interviewing a sample of residents living in sheltered accommodation, while the second study surveyed respondents of retirement age at present living in ordinary housing. The investigation has shown that a considerable demand exists for purpose-built housing for sale to the elderly.     

Catering through Nominal Share Prices

We propose and test a catering theory of nominal stock prices. The theory predicts that when investors place higher valuations on low‐price firms, managers respond by supplying shares at lower price levels, and vice versa. We confirm these predictions in time‐series and firm‐level data using several measures of time‐varying catering incentives. More generally, the results provide unusually clean evidence that catering influences corporate decisions, because the process of targeting nominal share prices is not well explained by alternative theories.