The cost of treating injured workers: the changing workers' compensation landscape

To better understand the impact of changing health care delivery on the workers' compensation system and the cost of treating injured workers, the author examines the program within the context of recent environmental changes--including the likely impact of managed care.     

‘Everybody's talking at me’: the dynamics of information disclosure and consultation in high‐skill workplaces in the UK

This article examines the dynamics of direct and indirect consultation processes in three high‐skill work establishments in the UK. Drawing on a mix of case study survey and interview data, it analyses the experiences and attitudes of predominantly well‐qualified professional employees. Adopting the concept of ‘embeddedness’ of employee consultation at the workplace level, we find that despite considerable breadth and depth of practice, many employees remain dissatisfied with the extent of their individual and collective influence over management decision‐making processes. Four underlying contributory factors are presented: extant hierarchical and bureaucratic management styles, the negative impact of work overload, the individualisation of consultation through computerisation, and the weakness of cooperative forms of union engagement.     

Does corruption increase emerging market bond spreads?

We study the relationship between corruption and borrowing costs for governments and firms in emerging markets. Combining data on bonds traded in the global market with survey data on corruption compiled by Transparency International, we show that countries that are perceived as more corrupt must pay a higher risk premium when issuing bonds. The global bond market ascribes a significant cost to corruption: an improvement in the corruption score from the level of Lithuania to that of the Czech Republic lowers the bond spread by about one-fifth. This is true even after controlling for macroeconomic effects that are correlated with corruption. We find little evidence that investors became more sensitive to corruption in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.     

Suicide as an indicator of quality of life: evidence from dialysis patients

Quality of life has been measured in many different ways for patients with chronic medical conditions. What is unique about the approach used here is that it uses suicide rates as a relatively objective measure of quality of life within the population of dialysis patients. Using a Heckman selection model, we estimate the relative suicide rates across patients undergoing both hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis. Our empirical results show that patients on hemodialysis have relatively lower suicide rates after controlling for other factors. Specifically, our results indicate that 141 fewer suicides will occur for every 1,000 patients shifted from peritoneal to hemodialysis. Prior estimates of the higher costs of the latter modality yield an estimated expenditure of $42,043 per suicide avoided.     

Benchmarking by State Space Models

We have a monthly series of observations which are obtained from sample surveys and are therefore subject to survey errors. We also have a series of annual values, called benchmarks, which are either exact or are substantially more accurate than the survey observations; these can be either annual totals or accurate values of the underlying variable at a particular month. The benchmarking problem is the problem of adjusting the monthly series to be consistent with the annual values. We provide two solutions to this problem. The first of these is a two-stage method in which we first fit a state space model to the monthly data alone and then combine the results obtained at this stage with the benchmark data. In the second solution we construct a single series from the monthly and annual values together and fit a state space model to this series in a single stage. The treatment is extended to series which behave multiplicatively. The methods are illustrated by applying them to Canadian retail sales sereis.     

Approximations for densities of sufficient estimators

A simple method of obtaining asymptotic expansions for the densities of sufficient estimators is described. It is an extension of the one developed by O. Barndorff-Nielsen and D.R. Cox (1979) for exponential families. A series expansion in powers of n^?1 is derived of which the first term has an error of order n^?1 which can effectively be reduced to $\text{n}{}^{\mathrm{<mtext>-</mtext><mtext>?3</mtext><mtext>2</mtext>}}$ by renormalization. The results obtained are similar to those given by H.E. Daniels's (1954) saddlepoint method but the derivations are simpler. A brief treatment of approximations to conditional densities is given. Theorems are proved which extend the validity of the multivariate Edgeworth expansion to parametric families of densities of statistics which need not be standardized sums of independent and identically distributed vectors. These extensions permit the treatment of problems arising in time series analysis. The technique is used by J. Durbin (1980) to obtain approximations to the densities of partial serial correlation coefficients.     

Workers' compensation and injury duration: evidence from a natural experiment

This paper examines the effect of workers' compensation on time out of work. It introduces a "natural experiment8 approach of comparing individuals injured before and after increases in the maximum weekly benefit amount. The increases examined in Kentucky and Michigan raised the benefit amount for high-earnings individuals by approximately 50 percent, while low-earnings individuals, who were unaffected by the benefit maximum, did not experience a change in their incentives. Time out of work increased for those eligible for the higher benefits and remained unchanged for those whose benefits were constant. The estimated duration elasticities are clustered around 0.3-0.4.     

INTERGOVERNMENTAL GRANTS AND THE POSITIONING OF PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES AND CAUCUSES: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE 1992, 1996, AND 2000 ELECTION CYCLES

The present study tests the theory that states can impact the size of the grants they receive (per capita) from the federal government by becoming pivotal players in the federal electoral (primary/caucus) process. That is, by rearranging their presidential primary and caucus dates, states can play an important role in determining the field of candidates for the two major political parties in the United States. States are then likely to be rewarded within the budgetary process at the federal level, which begins with the executive branch. Results from a simultaneous equation system suggest that the impact of the average movement of primaries/caucuses in the sample period (10.36 days closer to 1 January) results in an increase of federal grants of $362 million to $1.2 billion (over a two-year period) for the average state. These results are consistent with the current pattern in the American political process of more front-ended presidential primaries and caucuses.