The economic burden of depression among adults with rheumatoid arthritis in the United States

Aims: Depression is the most frequent comorbidity reported among patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Comorbid depression negatively impacts RA patients’ health-related quality-of-life, physical function, mental function, mortality, and experience of pain and symptom severity. The objective of this study was to assess healthcare utilization, expenditures, and work productivity among patients with RA with or without depression.

Materials and methods: Data from adult patients who had at least two visits each related to RA and depression over a 1-year period were extracted from the Truven Health MarketScan research databases. Outcomes comprised healthcare resource utilization, work productivity loss, and direct healthcare costs comparing patients with RA with depression (n?=?3,478) vs patients with RA without depression (n?=?43,222).

Results: Patients with RA and depression had a significantly greater relative risk of hospitalization and number of all-cause and RA-related hospitalizations, utilization of emergency services, days spent in the hospital, physician visits, and RA-related surgeries compared with RA patients without depression. Patients with RA and depression had a higher risk of and experienced more events and days of short-term disability compared with patients without depression. The incremental adjusted annual all-cause and RA-related direct costs were $8,488 (95% CI = $6,793–$10,223) and $578 (95% CI = –$98–$1,243), respectively, when comparing patients with RA and depression vs RA only.

Limitations: The current analysis is subject to the known limitations of retrospective studies based on administrative claims data.

Conclusions: This study suggested increased healthcare utilization, work productivity loss, and economic burden among RA patients due to comorbid depression. These findings emphasize the importance of managing depression and including depression as a factor when devising treatment algorithms for patients with RA.     

State Trading Enterprises as an Impediment to Improved Market Access: The Case of the Korean Rice Market

The trade and welfare effects of tariffs are well known. Less well known, and more difficult to analyze, are the economic effects of state trading enterprises (STEs). Despite STEs in importing countries having the potential to limit market access, they are no longer on the agriculture agenda in the Doha Round Negotiations in the WTO, because some Members have asserted that importing STEs do not distort international trade. We evaluate this assertion through the use of a theoretical model of an STE, which is calibrated to data for the Korean rice market. We show that this STE does distort international trade by restricting market access relative to a Cournot benchmark, and that it affects the domestic and international distribution of social welfare. This finding permits the conclusion that an important opportunity is being missed in the negotiations to improve market access, because importing STEs are not on the agenda.     

Forecasting Emerging Market Exchange Rates from Foreign Equity Options

The use of derivatives to infer future exchange rates has long been a subject of interest in the international finance literature. With the recent currency crises in Mexico, Southeast Asia, and Brazil, work on exchange rate expectations in emerging markets is of particular interest. For some emerging markets, foreign equity options are the only liquid exchange‐traded derivatives with currency information embedded in their prices. Given that emerging markets sometimes undergo currency realignment with discrete jumps in their exchange rate, estimation of risk‐neutral probability density functions from foreign equity option data provides valuable evidence concerning market expectations. To illustrate the use of foreign equity options in estimating market beliefs, we consider Telmex options around the 1994 peso devaluation and find evidence that markets anticipated the change in the Mexican government's foreign exchange policy.     

Negotiating the Evolution of the Hr Function: Practical Advice From the Health Care Sector

This paper has two aims. First, to consider explanations for the apparent gap between the paradigm of strategic human resource management on the one hand and actual HR practice on the other. Second, to generate practical advice for senior HR specialists who are aspriring to develop a strategic role for their function. the research underpinning these findings was based on case studies in three hospitals in Adelaide and a comparison of the findings with the situation at Leicester General NHS Trust where the first named author of this article was the HR director and a senior board member. the analysis reveals that specific features of each organisation's history, current structure and management, shape powerfully the nature of the HR function. Moreover, the local shaping factors define the degrees of freedom open to the HR function, so much so, that the notion that it can choose its organisational stance is here challenged.     

Inflation dynamics in Kazakhstan1

In January 1992, Kazakhstan initiated a reform programme to move towards market-determined prices. The price liberalization process was characterized by large relative price shifts and an increase in the overall price level towards those observed in market economies. The paper shows how the piecemeal manner in which prices were liberalized resulted in strong relative price variability over a prolonged period of time, against a background of high inflation. Convergence towards international relative and absolute price levels has progressed but is not complete, with prices for energy and services in particular still below market economy levels.     

Ethics in Information Technology and Software Use

The emerging concern about software piracy and illegal or unauthorized use of information technology and software has been evident in the media and open literature for the last few years. In the course of conducting their academic assignments, the authors began to compare observations from classroom experiences related to ethics in the use of software and information technology and systems. Qualitatively and anecdotally, it appeared that many if not most, students had misconceptions about what represented ethical and unethical behaviors in these realms. Clearly, one can argue that if college students are uncertain about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate behavior then this uncertainty will be carried forward into their workplaces upon graduation. Furthermore, if their workplaces don't provide ethics training as a component of a new employee orientation program, one can project a potential for unintentional violations and infringements of copyrights and law in the field. This study was conducted among graduate and undergraduate students to gain insight into their attitudes, perceptions and understanding of some of the relevant ethics issues. A questionnaire of 11 statements was employed that described ubiquitous but most likely unethical (or surely dubious) behaviors in the prevailing business and academic environments. Each respondent was asked to evaluate each statement twice (once for “self” and once for “colleague”) on a five-option highly ethical (5) to neutral (3) to highly unethical (1) scale. The statements were worded such that lower instrument score was associated with higher ethical responses. The questionnaire's two-part structure was designed to solicit honest answers. The encouraging learning from this study was that the overall sample and its various sub-samples did not consider any of the eleven behaviors to be “ethical” or “highly ethical.” It was also encouraging to note that the overall sample and all sub-samples considered “highly unethical” those behaviors associated with personal privacy or property or outright theft. This indicated that moral judgment and probity prevail. The discouraging learning was that behaviors associated with the use of enterprise property were viewed as “neutral” i.e., neither “ethical” nor “unethical.” These findings suggested confusion and lack of clarity and definition around workplace deportment as it regards ethics in software and information technology use. The current study suggests that additional research needs to be conducted to define and clarify the issues, which in turn can form the basis for programs to rectify or at least ameliorate the situation.     

QUADRATIC TERM STRUCTURE MODELS FOR RISK-FREE AND DEFAULTABLE RATES

In this paper, quadratic term structure models (QTSMs) are analyzed and characterized in a general Markovian setting. The primary motivation for this work is to find a useful extension of the traditional QTSM, which is based on an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) state process, while maintaining the analytical tractability of the model. To accomplish this, the class of quadratic processes, consisting of those Markov state processes that yield QTSM, is introduced. The main result states that OU processes are the only conservative quadratic processes. In general, however, a quadratic potential can be added to allow QTSMs to model default risk. It is further shown that the exponent functions that are inherent in the definition of the quadratic property can be determined by a system of Riccati equations with a unique admissible parameter set. The implications of these results for modeling the term structure of risk-free and defaultable rates are discussed.     

Construct measurement in strategic management research: illusion or reality?

Strategic management research has been characterized as placing less emphasis on construct measurement than other management subfields. In this work, we document the state of the art of measurement in strategic management research, and discuss the implications for interpreting the results of research in this field. To assess the breadth of measurement issues in the discipline, we conducted a content analysis of empirical strategic management articles published in leading journals in the period of 1998–2000. We found that few studies discuss reliability and validity issues, and empirical research in the field commonly relies on single‐indicator measures. Additionally, studies rarely address the problems of attenuation due to measurement error. We close with a discussion of the implications for future research and for interpreting prior work in strategic management. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.