正当怀疑和应有关注理念在审计师非审计服务中的运用

正当怀疑和应有关注是审计师在执业过程中应始终坚持的重要理念。随着非审计服务的不断拓展，强调正当怀疑和应有关注理念，无论对于保证审计师非审计服务的执业质量，还是维护审计师审慎的职业形象，都具有重大意义。审计师应在提供非审计服务时始终保持正当怀疑和应有关注理念，并将其灵活地运用于具体实务。     

Dissertation abstract: “Essays in applied economics on the intervention of a third player in agency relationships”

Agency theory has established that appropriate incentives can reconcile the diverging interests of the principal and the agent. Focusing on three applications, this dissertation evaluates the empirical relevance of these results when a third party interacts with the primary contract. The analyses provided rely on either laboratory or natural experiments. First, corruption is analyzed as a two-contract situation: a delegation contract between a Principal and an Agent and a corruption pact concluded between this Agent and a third player, called Briber. A survey of the recent microeconomic literature on corruption first highlights how corruption behavior results from the properties of those two agreements. We thereafter show that the Agent faces a conflict in reciprocities due to those two conflicting agreements. The resulting delegation effect, supported by observed behavior in our three-player experimental game, could account for the deterrence effect of wages on corruption. Second, health care is governed by contradictory objectives: patients are mainly concerned with the health provided, whereas containing health care costs is the primary goal of health care administrators. We provide further insights into the ability of incentives to balance these two competing objectives. In this matter, our theoretical and econometric analysis evaluates how a new mixed compensation scheme, introduced in Quebec in 1999 as an alternative to fee-for-services, has affected physicians’ practice patterns. Free switching is shown to be an essential feature of the reform, since it implements screening between physicians. Finally, the demand for underground work departs from the traditional Beckerian approach to illegal behavior, due to the dependence of benefits from illegality on competitors’ behavior. We set up a theoretical model in which the demand for underground work from all producers competing on the same output market is analyzed simultaneously. We first show that competition drastically undermines the individual benefits of tax evasion. At equilibrium, each firm nonetheless chooses evasion with a positive probability, strictly lower than one. This Bertrand curse could then account for the “tax evasion puzzle” i.e. the overprediction of evasion in models that ignore market interactions. We thereafter show that allowing firms to denounce competitors’ evasion is not likely to solve this curse—by providing a credible threat against price cuts, it fosters illegal work. Empirical evidence from a laboratory experiment confirms these predictions. Without denunciation, experimental firms often choose evasion whereas evasion benefits are canceled out by competition. When introduced, denunciation is rarely used by firms, but the threat makes evasion profitable. JEL Classification K42, I18, D21, C25, C91     

长期护理保险在中国的选择-基于制度经济学的分析

为了解决人口老龄化背景下的老年护理问题,德国、日本先后于1995年1月1日、2000年4月1日启动长期护理保险制度。我国在1999年也已经进入老龄化国家行列,老龄化并呈加速趋势。我国农村家庭养老看护功能日益削弱、城镇养老机构数量不足、新型居家养老模式的资金来源不足。有必要借鉴德国、日本长期护理保险制度,采取城市的居家养老护理保险与农村的老年护理救助模式。基于制度经济学的角度,从价值支持、意识形态支持、成本支持与路径支持上论证了该制度的可行性。     

Comprehensive assessment of patients with irritable bowel syndrome with constipation and chronic idiopathic constipation using deterministically linked administrative claims and patient-reported data: the Chronic Constipation and IBS-C Treatment and Outcomes Real-World Research Platform (CONTOR)

Abstract

Aims

To characterize a US population of patients with irritable bowel syndrome with constipation (IBS-C) or chronic idiopathic constipation (CIC) using CONTOR, a real-world longitudinal research platform that deterministically linked administrative claims data with patient-reported outcomes data among patients with these conditions.     

The Attitudes of British National Health Service Managers and Clinicians Towards the Introduction of Benchmarking

This paper describes an empirical study, conducted in three acute hospitals, of the attitudes of central managers, medical managers and clinicians towards the adoption of benchmarking. Benchmarking was portrayed in The New NHS White Paper (1997) as an important means of improving efficiency over the next decade. The present paper examines the context of change and nature of benchmarking. Findings are presented in seven sections including: the understanding which respondents had of benchmarking; their willingness to be involved in benchmarking; the existence of strategies and policies for implementing benchmarking; the relevance of existing costing information; and the role of networks in facilitating benchmarking. The study concludes that the process of change adopted contradicted most of the factors associated with creating receptivity to change. Also, that the publication of the National Reference Costs seemed to have more relevance to resource planning at central National Health Service Management Executive level, than to effecting improvements at operational level in acute hospitals.     

Flypaper Effect and Sluggishness: Evidence from Regional Health Expenditure in Italy

In Italy, public expenditure reduction is achieved through a revision of social security and health care programs. In particular, public health expenditure control has been implemented through a reform that imposes more stringent budget rules to local governments and a considerable reduction in grants-in-aid from the central government. This paper investigates empirically whether the response to this decrease in categorical lump-sum grants from the central to local governments results in an asymmetric response to intergovernmental grants. Hard budget and soft budget constraint hypotheses are estimated by using a sample of cross-sectional and time observations covering the 20 Italian regions over the period 1989–1993. The main finding is the existence of a standard and a super flypaper effect in both models. The introduction of the soft-budget constraint hypothesis results in a stronger effect of grants and a lower response of own resources which shows that local governments prefer to incur some deficit instead of reducing health care expenditure.     

Efficiency in the provision of social care for older people. A three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis using self-reported quality of life

Using a three-stage data envelopment analysis approach, this paper explores efficiency in the provision of social care for older people in 148 English Councils in 2009/10. Departing from D'Amico and Fernández (2012) [31] our measure of efficiency is inscribed within the production of welfare framework and based on self-reported quality of life of recipients of the services. Our results indicate a high level of efficiency, but once we control for the effects of a number of environmental variables, we found that more stringent eligibility criteria and higher assessment costs are negatively associated with the efficiency in the provision of social services.     

The evolution of the disability-adjusted life year (DALY)

The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a summary health measure that combines mortality and morbidity into a single measure as a way to estimate global disease burden and the effectiveness of health interventions. We review the methodological progression of the DALY, focusing on how the use of life expectancy estimates, disability weights, age weighting, and discounting has evolved since the first DALY reports were published in 1993. These changes have generally improved the metric but have made it difficult for researchers to interpret, compare, and conduct DALY studies.     

Converting retirement benefit into a life care annuity with graded benefits*

This paper deals with life care annuities, i.e. bundled products comprising a life annuity and long-term care insurance. It aims to assess the cost of converting retirement benefit into a life care annuity with graded benefits using a pre-existing public pay-as-you-go pension scheme. With this objective in mind, we present an actuarial method based on array calculus for valuing this type of life care annuity. The health dynamics of the annuitant rely on a reversible illness-death multistate framework. The paper contains a numerical example in which mortality and disability assumptions are based on data from the USA and Australia, although this should be viewed simply as an illustration. In addition, in order to check the coherence of these data, we compute life expectancy for both healthy and dependent persons, and then for dependent persons in each of the states of dependence. The effect of ruling out the recovery assumption on the annuity’s cost is also assessed. The analysis provides valuable insights into how much it would cost to introduce these annuities and enables us to make some policy recommendations to help ensure that this combined pension scheme has a good actuarial design.     

Health insurance reform: The impact of a Medicare buy-in

The steady-state general equilibrium and welfare consequences of a Medicare buy-in program, optional for those aged 55–64, is evaluated in a calibrated life-cycle economy with incomplete markets. Incomplete markets and adverse selection create a potential welfare improving role for health insurance reform. We find that adverse selection eliminates any market for a Medicare buy-in if it is offered as an unsubsidized option to individual private health insurance. The subsidy needed to bring the number of uninsured to less than 5 percent of the target population could be financed by an increase in the labor income tax rate of just 0.03–0.18 percent depending on how the program is implemented.