5 pillars of clinical integration

Implementing an effective clinical integration program requires deliberate investment of time and resources in five key areas: Physician leadership, Physician-led care management, Quality monitoring, Patient information and data sharing, Payer engagement.     

Price Clustering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange

This paper examines price clustering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). Regardless of tick and lot size, prices ending in zero and five are the most popular. The TSE has no market makers or direct negotiation between traders; therefore, clustering is not explained by collusion or negotiation. Our evidence supports the attraction hypothesis. Clustering also extends to order book depth. There is evidence of strategic trading behavior as traders place orders one price tick better than zero and five to avoid queuing orders at prices ending in these digits. Strategic trading behavior declined and clustering increased when the market became anonymous.     

Anonymity,liquidity and fragmentation

We examine the effects of the removal of broker identifiers from the central limit order book of the Australian Stock Exchange. We find that spreads and order aggressiveness decline, and order book depth increases, with the introduction of anonymous trading. This is consistent with the hypothesis that limit order traders are more willing to expose their orders when they can do so anonymously. Anonymous markets attract order flow from non-anonymous substitute markets, but this effect is only seen in large stocks. Our results suggest that exchanges operating in fragmented markets should consider anonymous trading to improve price competition and liquidity, although some of these benefits may be significant only if the stocks are sufficiently large and liquid.     

Dr. Irene Hickman and Tax Reform in Sacramento County, Calif.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can—and mean to keep doing so until the end.     

Correction to: Semi-analytical prices for lookback and barrier options under the Heston model

Decisions in Economics and Finance - In this note, we point out a mistake in Theorem 1 of De De Gennaro Aquino and Bernard (Decis Econ Finance 42(2):715–741, 2019) and provide some missing...     

Scrutinizing local public service provision

Set in the context of an expansion of scrutiny by local authorities of local service provision, this article explores the key challenges ahead for managers and politicians in this area of local governance. Drawing on an evaluation of the development of health scrutiny, it outlines the different types of activities health scrutiny committees are engaging in to fulfil their legislative commitments and suggests lessons for the expansion of external scrutiny.     

ON THE MARTINGALE PROPERTY IN STOCHASTIC VOLATILITY MODELS BASED ON TIME‐HOMOGENEOUS DIFFUSIONS

Lions and Musiela give sufficient conditions to verify when a stochastic exponential of a continuous local martingale is a martingale or a uniformly integrable martingale. Blei and Engelbert and Mijatovi? and Urusov give necessary and sufficient conditions in the case of perfect correlation (). For financial applications, such as checking the martingale property of the stock price process in correlated stochastic volatility models, we extend their work to the arbitrary correlation case (). We give a complete classification of the convergence properties of both perpetual and capped integral functionals of time‐homogeneous diffusions and generalize results in Mijatovi? and Urusov with direct proofs avoiding the use of separating times (concept introduced by Cherny and Urusov and extensively used in the proofs of Mijatovi? and Urusov).     

Concept Mapping as a Means of Evaluating Primary School Technology Programmes

Concept mapping provides a means for teachers and pupils to represent their understanding of an area of knowledge. It has been used as a planning tool by teachers to identify a framework of specific concepts and their propositions within a topic, as an assessment tool and as a means of collaborative sharing of knowledge. Information from two primary schools would also suggest that it can be used as a means of evaluating a school programme of primary technology. Research into people's perceptions and attitudes to technology indicated that there were a number of concepts and propositions associated with this field of study. A variety of groups of people including primary children were asked to describe what they understood to be technology and this information was constructed into a concept map format. The two schools described in the study had different programmes to deliver technology within the curriculum area of environmental studies. The first school had a planned programme of technology which was taught by the head teacher of the school. The second school had technology taught by class teachers, running as a thread throughout the environmental studies programme. In the first case the children knew when they were engaged in a technological task whereas in the second case the technology was implicit and the children were not necessarily aware of any specific subject area. The children's perceptions of technology and their attitudes towards it were analysed with reference to the constructed concept map. In the school where there were specifically programmed technological tasks, the children indicated that their understandings of technology were focused towards the design process; they identified technology as designing, making, problem solving and generating ideas. In relation to the Scottish curriculum their knowledge was concentrated in the area of the outcome entitled 'Understanding and Using the Design Process'. Children in the second school indicated that their understanding of technology was related to objects including computers and new inventions. This demonstrated that their ideas were mostly linked to the outcome entitled 'Understanding and Using Technology in Society'. It can be argued that in order to have a comprehensive understanding of technology the children should have knowledge and understanding of both outcomes. In the light of the results the head teachers of the respective schools decided to look more closely at their programmes in order to find out what modifications might be made. The head teacher of the first school decided to question the children more closely because he was aware of some attitudinal difference between the boys and the girls. He has now decided to do some further research in his school to see what changes need to be made. The head teacher of the second school is about to embark on a complete review of her school technology programme. The results of the research would suggest that concept mapping in the suggested form is a possible tool for evaluation of primary school technology prorammes. However this was only a small case study and further research would have to be done to provide more substantial evidence.     

PROBABILITY OF PRICE REVERSAL AND RELATIVE NOISE IN STOCK AND OPTION MARKETS

In this paper we take a new approach to the study of the interrelation between stock and option markets by extending Stoll's (1989) model of cost components of the bid-ask spread to include an error component in prices. Building upon Stoll's estimates of the probability of price reversals, we determine which of the option or stock markets carries more noise. The empirical results indicate that option markets are noisier than stock markets. Such findings are consistent with the view that option markets serve as a testing ground for noisy new information because of their comparative advantage regarding transaction costs, liquidity, and potential leverage.