Impact of the economic downturn on nursing schools

The challenges posed by the economic downturn on baccalaureate nursing schools in the southeast as it relates to their perceptions of changes in the number of applicants, acceptance rates, employer recruitment efforts, and student clinical and job placement were explored. Responses from deans and program directors indicated nursing schools are experiencing negative effects of the economic downturn in the form of graduates having difficulty finding employment, decreased recruitment efforts from prospective employers, difficulty locating clinical placements for students, and no change in faculty applicants despite an increase in undergraduate student applicants as well as graduate student applicants. These multiple factors combined could signal the death knell for programs that are ill-prepared to deal with such a crisis. Programs need to be aggressive in their efforts to draw health care recruiters as well as qualified faculty applicants to their campuses. Nursing schools must be able to clearly show why their graduates are superior to other programs' graduates when competing for both highly qualified faculty applicants and prospective student employers.     

Taxing and spending in the long view: the causal structure of US fiscal policy, 1791-1913

Causal relations between US federal taxation and expenditureare analyzed using an approach based on the invariance of econometricrelationships in the face of structural interventions. Institutionalevidence for interventions or changes of regime and econometrictests for structural breaks are used to investigate the relativestability of conditional and marginal probability distributionsfor each variable. The patterns of stability are the productsof the underlying causal order. Consistent with earlier workon the post World War II period, we find that dominant causaldirection (with only a short-lived reversal) runs from taxesto spending in the period before World War I.     

The Texaco incident

The topic of this paper concerns corporate responsibility and worker safety. In particular it focuses on the notions of willing and intending and how these relate to risk-taking in the workplace. I discuss the metaphysical status of the corporation, the distinction between willing and intending and the motivations of each, and Austin's distinction between accidents and mistakes in light of a single industrial accident which occurred at the Texaco Oil Refinery, Port Arthur, Texas, in October, 1982. My aim is to argue that corporations do not alleviate themselves from moral responsibility in the workplace solely because they might not intend to produce harm in a given situation. Joan Catherine Whitman Hoff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bentley College. She has been given the NEH 1983 Summer Seminar for College Teachers award and the Northern Kentucky University 1985 Faculty Summer Fellowship. Her most important publications, with J. Ferrante Wallace, Women in Sports and The Black Athlete, appear in Sports History: Selected Materials from Colleges and Universities (eds. D. A. Novern and L. E. Ziewarz).Many sincere thanks to the NEH for having provided the time and money for this research, to Dr. Peter French for his helpful seminar, and to Mr. Peter Applebome for his stimulating comments.     

Insurers' Demutualization Decisions

ABSTRACT: Several explanations of why mutual insurers choose to demutualize their businesses are examined with a recent survey of mutual insurers. This study adds to the literature by surveying mutual insurers' executives on those factors that would lead them to demutualize their companies. Both univariate and multivariate techniques are applied to analyze those responses. Demutualization is most strongly influenced by access to capital markets, increased organizational flexibility, and the chance for company officers to increase their pay, as prior literature has suggested.     

Factors affecting electricity generation in China: Current situation and prospects

China has attracted worldwide attention due to the global economic and environmental effects of its rapid economic growth over the last 20 years, with particular attention given to the country's accelerating energy consumption and resulting greenhouse gas emissions. China's electricity sector is particularly important for both of these issues as it accounts for nearly half of its greenhouse gas emissions and even greater proportions of the country's demands for primary fuel resources. In order to better understand how these issues may progress in an economy changing as fast as China's, this paper develops a framework that can be used to help model the electricity sector's future development. The framework builds upon key technological and socio-economic drivers, including those affecting electricity demand (e.g., economic growth, structure, energy efficiency, urbanization, and change in per capita income) and electricity supply (e.g., deregulation, initiatives to promote natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy, air pollution regulations, price developments for coal and natural gas, and changes in generation technology). The framework serves as a foundation for a scenario exercise on the greenhouse gas and fuel consumption impacts of different developmental paths for China's electricity sector. These scenarios and their implications for emissions and fuel consumption are presented in a subsequent article.