Staffing excellence: moving from retrospective to prospective management of risk

Our complex health care system will not be error free for the foreseeable future. Certain interventions must be put into place to manage that risk, and staffing effectiveness is a critical part of clinical risk management. Application of research and practice can create a basis for a proactive risk management plan, and will build in an essential feedback loop to leadership. Pay for performance initiatives by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and other payers are creating further incentive to get to zero errors faster. By implementing what we know about staffing and avoidable errors, we are in a very good position to meet the challenges to create a safe health care system.     

Quote disclosure and price discovery in multiple-dealer financial markets

We examine the effects of price disclosure on market performancein a continuous experimental multiple-dealer market in whichseven professional market makers trade a single security. Thedealers trade with one another and with computerized informedand liquidity traders. Our key comparison is between fully publicprice queues (pretrade transparent market) and bilateral quoting(pretrade opaque). We find that opening spreads are wider andtrading volume is lower in the opaque markets due to highersearch costs there. More importantly, however, higher searchcosts also induce more aggressive pricing strategies, so thatprice discovery is much faster in the opaque markets.     

Control rights, debt structure, and the loss of private benefits: the case of the UK insolvency code

We show how the efficiency of reorganization is affected bythe distribution of control rights under the U.K insolvencycode. Control rights raise particular problems when creditorshave different incentives to keep the firm as a going concern.Such differences may arise from the possession of private benefitsby particular creditors which are lost if the debtor firm isliquidated. The incidence of inefficient liquidations is influencedby the size and seniority of creditors' claims. The currentU.K. code is widely thought to give rise to inefficient liquidations.We show, however, that inefficiency depends upon the debt structureand whether the controlling creditor in formal bankruptcy hasprivate benefits.