Exclusions of infertility treatment in the aftermath of Bragdon v. Abbott

This article analyzes the Supreme Court's decision in Bragdon v. Abbott to determine whether the Court's reading of ADA necessarily leads to the conclusion that a group health plan's or insurer's exclusion or limitation of coverage with respect to infertility is prohibited by ADA. The authors conclude that it may be advisable for plans to perform at least minimal actuarial calculations with respect to the current or anticipated costs of covering infertility treatments prior to adopting any exclusions or limitations of coverage.     

The Involvement of Civil Society Organizations in British Industrial Relations: Extent,Origins and Significance

This article examines the involvement of civil society organizations (CSOs) in UK industrial relations. Organizations of this type, including advocacy, campaigning, identity and community organizations have attracted increasing attention from employment relations scholars in recent years. The study reported in this article demonstrates that CSOs have become increasingly active in the sphere of work and employment, partly in response to trade union decline but also owing to political opportunities, afforded by the labour market policy of the New Labour government. It is claimed that CSOs operate at multiple levels of the industrial relations system and interact with the state, employers and trade unions. They generate significant effects within UK industrial relations and can rightly be judged significant ‘new actors’ on the UK employment scene.     

Increasing the usability and accessibility of geodynamic modelling tools to the geoscience community: UnderworldGUI

Geoscientists are faced with a number of complexities that represent obstacles to the development of realistic simulation of deep earth processes. Realistic 4D thermo-mechanical simulation using software packages like Underworld and Gale, when combined appropriately with geoscientific expertise, can lead to novel insights into the deformation of geological structures at a wide range of time and spatial scales. The challenge for end-user geoscientists lies in applying their knowledge within the framework of the software’s input specification, including initial, internal, and boundary conditions and output visualization parameters. We have built a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to remove many of the difficulties related to editing the Extensible Markup Language (XML) encoded input files of Underworld/Gale geomodels and therefore, to greatly broaden the user base of these software packages. By helping Underworld/Gale to meet a large audience, we provide a tool to the geoscience community that helps to move from untested conceptual models to physically valid, properly scaled modelling. Furthermore, the UnderworldGUI offers a mechanism for storing and retrieving experimental models in a centralised database, thus providing the geoscience community with a means to share the outcomes of its experimental research. Further details of the UnderworldGUI are available at the web site http://www.wiki.vislab.usyd.edu.au/moinwiki/UnderworldGUI.     

The intellectual ecology of mainstream marketing research: an inquiry into the place of marketing in the family of business disciplines

Many inside mainstream academic marketing judge the discipline’s influence within the family of business disciplines (as well as in practice) to be in decline. Despite great research productivity, methodologies as sophisticated as any in the social sciences, and a large and rich literature, opinion and evidence suggest that academic marketing is the least influential of the mainstream academic business disciplines. Nevertheless, marketing’s decline is not inexorable. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate this perplexing situation by: (1) assembling and evaluating a number of expert opinions from within marketing; (2) exploring relations and patterns of influence among the leading academic journals in accounting, finance, management, and marketing and evaluating the position and influence of each field; (3) attempting to understand marketing’s problems; and (4) exploring avenues to move marketing back to its once prominent position among the business disciplines.     

Foreign investment in Russia and China: A long way to go,but reason for optimism

D. LeBaron, with D. Carpenter. 2002. Mao, Marx, and the Market: Capitalist Adventures in Russia and China. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 303 pages; ISBN: 0‐471‐15315‐X. B. Granville & P. Oppenheimer (Eds.). 2001. Russia's Post‐Communist Economy. Oxford, England: University Press. 538 pages; ISBN 0‐19‐829525‐1. H. Fung & K.H. Zhang (Eds.). 2002. Financial Markets and Foreign Direct Investment in Greater China. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 302 pages; ISBN: 0‐7656‐0804‐9.     

The process of internationalization in the operating firm

Two factors have been emphasised as influencing the choice of, and subsequent shifts between, modes of foreign market servicing: (1) market-specific knowledge; and (2) the generalised knowledge from operating internationally. The process-oriented literature on internalisation has tended to emphasise the former over the latter. This article maintains that market-specific knowledge is not the only source of information available to a firm. As firms operate in foreign markets they develop, in addition to networks of institutional arrangements, a knowledge of the process of internationalization. Account therefore has to be taken of the general knowledge from operating internationally in understanding the development of institutional arrangements in foreign markets. Consequently, the appropriate unit of analysis is not the individual market but the operating firm as a whole. This argument is illustrated with reference to an empirical study of the internationalization of 25 UK-based organizations.     

The growing dependence of Britain on trade during the Industrial Revolution

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates. We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the Rest of the World, and calibrate the model to data from the 1760s and 1850s. We find that while trade had only a small impact on British welfare in the 1760s, it had a very large impact in the 1850s. This contrast is robust to a large range of parameter perturbations. Biased technological change and population growth were key in explaining Britain's growing dependence on trade during the Industrial Revolution.