Qualified medical child support orders--California health insurance coverage assignment orders--national medical support notices: what's a plan administrator to do?

Many employer-sponsored health plans and multi-employer health benefit trusts have seen an increase in medical child support orders (MCSOs), and they can anticipate receiving a greater number in the future. Once regulations are final for the national medical support notice (NMSN) required by the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act of 1998, plans should also begin receiving these. In preparation, plan administrators should ensure that they have proper procedures in place for determining whether MCSOs and NMSNs constitute QMCSOs.     

Ethical and Unethical Bargaining Tactics: An Empirical Study

Competitive negotiators frequently use tactics which others view as "unethical", in that these tactics either violate standards of truth telling or violate the perceived rules of negotiation. This paper sought to determine how business students viewed a number of marginally ethical negotiating tactics, and to determine the underlying factor structure of these tactics. The factor analysis of these tactics revealed five clear factors which were highly similar across the two samples, and which parallel (to a moderate degree) categories of tactics proposed by earlier theory. Data from one sample also permitted comparisons of the appropriateness of certain tactics across gender, nationality, ethnic origin and perception of one's negotiating style.     

The ubiquitous tourist brochure explorations in its intended and unintended use

The format and content of tourist attraction brochures are examined. Emphasis is on their function in encouraging tourists to establish authentic “traveler-like” personal contact with the local people and area. The Old Order Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is the setting studied. Findings indicate that brochures advertising staged tourist attractions implicity encourage tourists to move away from contact with the indigenous population and culture. Attractions are presented as convenient, efficient, and authentic means of “sampling” the region. Questions are raised about the probable consequences for a local area and its people, should large numbers of tourists choose to seek our direct and “authentic” contact with the indigenous community. It may be the staged attractions, while often the object of intellectual critique, protect the community from the pressures of mass tourism.     

Why statutory union recognition is bad labour policy:the North American experience

The proposed British legislation is modelled on that of the United States which has been a clear failure in its stated goal of encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining (Adams, 1993). It has instead perpetuated a culture of labour-management animosity that many other nations have 113been able, to their benefit, to overcome (Adams, 1995c).     

Seebohm Rowntree and the postwar poverty puzzle

In his third social survey of York carried out in 1950, Seebohm Rowntree reported a steep decline since 1936 of the percentage of households in poverty. He attributed the bulk of this decline to government welfare reforms enacted during and after the war. This article re‐examines the survivingrecords from the 1950 survey, using a revised poverty line and looking more closely at the measurement of income. It also re‐assesses the impact of welfare reforms on working‐class poverty, and finds that poverty in York was significantly higher, and the contribution of welfare reform substantially less, than was originally reported.     

An Exploratory Analysis of Factors Influencing Initial Market Response and Media Reports following Shock Corporate Events

This article examines market efficiency in a natural environment using minute‐by‐minute share prices following fatal industrial disasters and sudden CEO deaths, and their subsequent media reports. Prices of affected firms start to react within an hour of shock events and fall by 3%; half this fall is reversed prior to the first media reports with the balance reversed by the next trading day. Spreads behave in similar fashion. This is interpreted as market overreaction as risk‐averse investors respond to uncertainty created by the shock; prices return to pre‐shock levels once it is clear that the event is to be expected and already built into valuations.     

THE INFLUENCE OF FIRM‐ AND CEO‐SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS ON THE USE OF NONLINEAR DERIVATIVE INSTRUMENTS

We examine why firms use nonlinear derivatives (e.g., options). Our results suggest that option characteristics in investment opportunities and debt, the payoff structure of incentive compensation, and free cash‐flow agency problems influence the firm's choice. Investment opportunities, internally generated cash flow, business risk, and option compensation positively influence the use of nonlinear currency derivatives. Option feature in bonds positively influence the use of nonlinear interest rate derivatives, whereas bonus and stock compensation, and CEO tenure have a negative influence. In sum, nonlinear cash flow characteristics in investment opportunity, debt, and executive compensation all relate positively to nonlinear derivative usage.     

Inequality and Size of the Informal Sector during Recession: A Note

This note provides a theoretical explanation for the empirical observation that more unequal economies tend to have larger informal sector. In contrary to the general belief, it shows that informal sector does not necessarily expand at the time of recession acting as a buffer for the unemployed pool.     

Market information and channel price structure

An analytical model is developed that considers the effect of demand information, and the precision with which demand forecasts are made, on channel profitability. Different channel price structures such as Stackelberg and Vertically integrated are considered and comparisons are made of the impact of information precision on channel profits under each structure. Other demand factors such as brand substitutability and share of base level demand are also included in the analysis, and the interaction of information and demand effects is examined. An empirical study is carried out using a sample of firms based in Hong Kong and support is found for the model propositions.     

Land reform and agricultural productivity in India: a review of the evidence

In this paper we review as well as contribute to the empiricalliterature on the impact of land reform on agricultural productivityin India. We find that, overall for all states, land-reformlegislation had a negative and significant effect on agriculturalproductivity. However, this hides considerable variation acrosstypes of land reform, as well as variation across states. Decomposingby type of land reform, the main driver for this negative effectseems to be land-ceiling legislation. In contrast, the effectof tenancy reform, averaged across all states, is insignificant.There seems to be a wide range of state-specific effects, whichsuggests that focusing on average treatment effects can hidea considerable amount of heterogeneity. In particular, allowinga separate slope for West Bengal, one of the few states thatimplemented tenancy laws rigorously, we find that land reformhad a marginal positive effect relative to the rest of India.