Rationalizing Northern Ireland Hospital Services Towards Larger Providers: Best-Practice Efficiency Studies and Current Policy

This article explores the relative efficiency of Northern Ireland hospitals, and in particular the efficiency of small hospitals relative to their large counterparts, employing a technique called data envelopment analysis. The empirical analysis revealed that larger hospitals displayed higher cost efficiency, higher allocative efficiency and higher technical efficiency than their smaller counterparts. These results support Northern Ireland's recent strategy of concentrating hospital services in six large hospitals, supported by medium sized hospitals, and closing or restructuring smaller hospitals.     

Unverzichtbar: Erfahrene Kollegen

Zusammenfassung  Arbeitskr?ftesituation in der Pflege — 2010 ist fast jeder dritte Erwerbst?tige über 50. Das betrifft auch die Pflegebranche. Die Ver?nderungen, die sich dadurch bei gleichzeitigem Nachwuchsmangel ergeben, werden allerdings bisher wenig diskutiert. Welche M?glichkeiten gibt es, dem Arbeitskr?ftemangel in der Pflege zu begegnen?     

Laying off credit risk: Loan sales versus credit default swaps

How do markets for debt cash flow rights, with and without accompanying control rights, affect the efficiency of lending? A bank makes a loan, learns if it needs monitoring, and then decides whether to lay off credit risk. The bank can transfer credit risk by either selling the loan or buying a credit default swap (CDS). With a CDS, the originating bank retains the loan's control rights; with loan sales, control rights pass to the loan buyer. Credit risk transfer leads to excessive monitoring of riskier credits and insufficient monitoring of safer credits. Increases in banks' cost of equity capital exacerbate these effects. For riskier credits, loan sales typically dominate CDS but not for safer credits. Once repeated lending and consequent reputation concerns are modeled, although CDSs remain dominated by loan sales for riskier credits, for safer credits they can dominate loan sales, supporting better monitoring (albeit to a limited extent) while allowing efficient risk sharing. Restrictions on the bank's ability to sell the loan expand the range in which CDSs are used and monitoring is too low.     

MARKET FAILURE: A FAILED PARADIGM1

The concept of ‘market failure’ is often used to justify government intervention. Here, the author asks whether the concept is sufficiently meaningful for it to be used to make policy judgments.     

Setting NYSE Circuit Breaker Triggers

This paper investigates the stochastic behavior of large movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and applies the results to estimate the probability that the circuit breaker mechanism employed by the New York Stock Exchange will be activated. This is accomplished using extreme value statistics. In addition, the results confirm the inflexibility of a fixed-point circuit breaker.     

Interest rates are low but are annuities expensive?

It is often claimed that annuities are now 'expensive'. That claim is at least partly based on money illusion. Careful analysis shows that the current prices of annuities are largely the result of a decline in inflation expectations which has brought about a change in the income stream for annuities.     

Do quits cause under-training?

A recent finding in the training literature is that there willbe under-investment in skills if there is a positive quit rate,training is at least partially transferable, and there is imperfectcompetition in the labour market. We explore the conditionsunder which this under-investment result might be reversed.In economies characterised by uncertainty about future productivity,we show that a higher quit rate may increase the number of workerstrained, by making firms wait less for information about futureproductivity before training new workers. At low quit rates,this offsets all of the under-investment effect.     

Impacts of the Japanese patent system on productivity growth

We investigate empirically how the Japanese patent system has affected post-war growth in Japanese total factor productivity. The system has been criticized for several reasons, including that it encourages numerous filings of narrow claims that build incrementally on fundamental technologies developed by domestic and foreign inventors. Stated in different terms, the system was designed to promote technological catch-up and diffusion through incremental innovation. However, its effectiveness in achieving this purpose has not been studied systematically. We provide econometric evidence that the technology diffused through the Japanese patent system had a significant and positive impact on Japan's technical progress.