Current trends in hospital mergers and acquisitions

Healthcare reform will impact hospital consolidation in three key areas: Payment rates will decrease, indirectly encouraging consolidation by forcing hospitals to find new ways to reduce costs and increase negotiating clout with suppliers and payers. The cost of doing business will increase as hospitals spend more on compliance, technology, and physician employment. The ACO model will encourage hospital network formation by rewarding integrated healthcare systems that can reduce costs and improve quality.     

Misspecified Recovery

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of those states as used by investors. To better understand the challenge in distinguishing investors' beliefs from risk‐adjusted discounting, we use Perron–Frobenius Theory to isolate a positive martingale component of the stochastic discount factor process. This component recovers a probability measure that absorbs long‐term risk adjustments. When the martingale is not degenerate, surmising that this recovered probability captures investors' beliefs distorts inference about risk‐return tradeoffs. Stochastic discount factors in many structural models of asset prices have empirically relevant martingale components.     

农村资金互助社可持续发展模式探讨及路径选择——以甘肃临夏回族自治州为例

资金互助社作为农村新型金融机构,在满足农村多样化资金需求,促进农民消费、投资、应对风险以及发挥扶贫功能上都发挥着十分重要的作用.本文以临夏回族自治州为例,探讨农村资金互助社可持续发展模式,及其与金融效率、金融稳定、地区经济协调发展的运营模式,旨在找到一条适合少数民族地区农村资金互助社发展的可行路径.     

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Existence and Uniqueness of Recursive Utilities

We obtain exact necessary and sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of solutions of a class of homothetic recursive utility models postulated by Epstein and Zin. The conditions center on a single test value with a natural economic interpretation. The test sheds light on the relationship between valuation of cash flows, impatience, risk adjustment, and intertemporal substitution of consumption. We propose two methods to compute the test value when an analytical solution is not available. We further provide several applications.     

Sabotage in rent-seeking contests

This article considers the interaction between two types ofeffort in lobbying contests: effort that improves the contestant'sown performance (standard rent seeking), and effort that reducesparticular rivals' performance (sabotage). Due to a positiveexternality, sabotage is a 'small number' phenomenon. Sabotagemay increase lobbying efforts and the dissipation rate in lobbyingcontests compared to a situation in which sabotage is not feasible.     

PLATFORM COMPETITION WITH ‘MUST‐HAVE’ COMPONENTS*

In platform‐component systems with indirect network effects, some ‘must‐have’ components are so popular with consumers that they create large, discrete indirect network effects when they become available on a platform. For example, ESPN is a must‐have component of cable TV platforms. This paper examines how platform market structures determine exclusive versus non‐exclusive contracts between platforms and components. It shows that a component provider is more likely to sign exclusive contracts with a single platform if its popularity is high, the platform market share difference is large, and cross‐platform indirect network effects are low.