2004年加拿大预防血透病人医院血流感染的成本-效益分析

目的：血液透析相关的血流感染是一个严重的公共健康问题,因为加拿大的血液透析病人从1996年到2005翻了一番。本研究目的在于确定加拿大医院血流感染的成本,估算在综合性医院中建立感染控制项目的成本,并进行成本-效益分析。材料与方法：用加拿大医院感染监测项目的数据来估算医院血流感染的发生率。用加拿大健康信息所数据来估算2004年加拿大平均一次血流感染住院的额外成本。建立和维护一个感染控制项目的成本用美国疾病预防与控制中心1985年的成本换算为2004年的加拿大成本来估算。假设感染控制项目能降低医院血流感染病例的20％～30％。结果：2004年的加拿大15278名血液透析病人中估计共有2524人发生血流感染。全年用于治疗血流感染的成本估计为4901万加元。医院血流感染预防和人力资源的总投资成本为815万加元。建立医院感染控制项目后能带来1452万加元的医疗成本节约。效益成本比在1．0：1到1．8：1之间。结论：本研究提供的证据表明,如果医院感染控制项目能降低20％～30％的感染,该项目的经济效益将远超过增加的成本。医院感染控制项目将带来双重效益：节约货币成本的同时改善医疗质量。     

Balancing Conflicts of Interest when Employing Spouses

Employees can be put in situations where they are required to make decisions on behalf of the organization as part of their job duties. In these situations, organizations desire that employees make these decisions in the organization’s best interest. In an attempt to ensure that decisions are made in the best interest of the organization, some organizations implement anti-nepotism policies and no spouse rules. While the intent is to minimize conflicts of interest among employees, these policies exact costs to organizations. The present paper examines the costs and benefits of these types of policies, as well as the effects of family-friendly benefits, on organizations. The examination is further laid out in terms of four examples of how these policies and rules can be reframed into conflict of interest policies, allowing organizations to fully experience the benefits of increasing the size of the labor pool by being able to consider spouses and family members as potential applicants, while minimizing conflicts of interest. Finally, recommendations concerning the use of focused conflict of interest policies are made.

The Hong Kong Umbrella Movement as a non-profit organization: An empirical study on the use of visual branding practices for social change

In this article, we draw our attention to the growth of a new social movement, as a non-profit organization which aims to effectively communicate its collective identity and messages to larger audiences. Initially, we provide a critical discussion on the interrelationships between marketing theory/practice and protest groups' promotional tactics. Afterwards, we focus on the interface between visual branding practices and new social movement's strategies to create a visual branding identity around their protest symbols and aims. In order to do so, we adopted a moderate participant observation approach to explore how the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement employed forms of visual branding to engage local and global audiences and induce social change. Drawing on a close examination of field notes and a visual analysis of digital archives and images from the protest sites, we identify and discuss the presence of several visual branding techniques for the imaginative promotion of the movement's demands and causes. Our findings suggest that the 2014 Umbrella Movement protesters coordinated and acted as non-profit organization which employed innovative and creative visual branding methods to enhance the movement's unity and trigger emotional responses from diverse audiences. We conclude the article with suggestions for future research around the interrelationships between social movements' protest symbols, transnational visual branding practices and non-profit organizational practices.     

Vested interests: how American and Chinese venture capitalists view essential management skills

This paper used semi-structured interviews with 11 highly successful venture capitalists from both the United States and China to examine perceptions of the essential nature of management skills for successful technology-based small-to-medium sized venture exits. Findings suggest American VCs appear to maintain a more global management perspective, whereas Chinese VCs appear to maintain a perspective that is more China-centric, or market specific, in nature. This divergence in perceptions of essential managerial skills offers an opportunity for the convergence of understanding of universal best practices. Implications for theory and research are discussed. Such an understanding may provide critical implications for successful exits from cross border ventures.     

Experience-based learning in innovation and production

How can we model and document the impact of experience in product innovation? We use data on the innovation and production histories of 294 product platforms to explore experience‐based learning. We extend learning curve concepts from their traditional domain – the production process – into the product innovation process to build and test a richer, quantitative model of learning. The results suggest that learning occurs differently in the innovation process than in production. They also suggest that how and where a firm learns depend in part on the complexity of product components and sub‐systems. Finally, we discuss the competitive implications for product innovation.     

Other financial institutions' portfolio behaviour and policy implications: A study of India

Abstract

Applied literature has largely neglected the asset decision of other financial institutions (OFIs), though it may possess important policy implications. In this paper, portfolio behaviour of OFIs in India is modelled by using the annual flow of funds data for 1951/52 to 1993/94. The long-run model of the Almost Ideal Demand System and the allied concepts of cointegration generated economically and statistically plausible results. We find a strong influence of interest rates on portfolio behavior, thereby the role of interest rates on resource allocation. The paper concludes that the macroeconomic management through monetary policy actions may not be unnecessarily limited through the channel of OFIs in the post-financial reform regime in India.     

Lone Mothers: What is to be done?

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum, ranging from those that seek to enable all lone mothers to take employment to those that aim to let mothers choose whether to take employment or care for their children themselves. Other policies discussed concern ways to value and support caregiving, improve the low-wage labor market for women, and provide a set of income supports that would both boost income and provide time to care for children.     

Monopoly Power and Stagflation

Post Keynesian economists have followed Joan Robinson's criticism of general equilibrium theory as abolishing history by allowing all contracts to be executed today for all future contingencies. This was the justification for the support of financial innovation to provide for the completeness of futures markets. The recent crisis has shown that force of history. Instead, many evolutionary and Keynesian economists have suggested the approach of cumulative causation as an approach that includes history and eschews equilibrium. This approach may provide a way to take history seriously in economic analysis.     

Teacher Effectiveness and Student Performance

This paper evaluates the effects of using graduate student instructors rather than regular faculty in a macro course. Experienced faculty presumably have a positive effect on student performance, yet graduate instructors appear to be as effective in teaching macro principles. What may be involved are different sets of skills: experienced faculty may have a greater depth of understanding of the material, more self-confidence, and a more critical approach. Graduate instructorS, on the other hand, may be able to grasp what students don't understand, and may make up in enthusiasm and approachability what they lack in understanding.

The author urges using more than one measure of effectiveness in studies of this type because of many things not captured: excitement with the subject, caution in accepting unsupported arguments, a perspective on the economic system, and the like.     

Gender Differences in Economic Knowledge: A Reevaluation of the Evidence

This study examines the importance and significance of male-female differences in understanding and learning economics and attempts to assess whether the use of multiple choice questions, rather than essay questions, contributes to these measured differences. Do multiple choice questions favor men with their possibly superior spatial and numerical skills? Do essay questions favor women with their possibly superior verbal skills? Evidence based on a study involving 589 students using an examination including both types of questions is analyzed in this article.