The Metabolic Syndrome and All-Cause Mortality in an Insured Lives Population

Abstract

Metabolic syndrome and its association with mortality have not been studied in insured lives populations. The Swiss Re Study evaluated metabolic syndrome prevalence and associated mortality from all causes and circulatory disease in a cohort of 35,470 predominantly healthy individuals, aged 18–83 years, who were issued life insurance policies between 1986 and 1997. Metabolic syndrome was defined using the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Expert Panel Adult Treatment Panel (ATP) III guidelines. The NCEP obesity criteria were modified with a prediction equation using body mass index, gender, and age substituted for waist circumference. Adjustments also were made for nonfasting triglyceride and blood glucose values. Risk ratios for policyholders identified with metabolic syndrome were 1.16 (P = .156) for mortality from all causes and 1.45 (P = .080) for mortality from circulatory disease compared with individuals without the syndrome. Risk was proportional to the number of components, or score, of the metabolic syndrome present. Risk ratios for metabolic syndrome score were 1.14 (P < .001) for mortality from all causes and 1.38 (P < .001) for mortality from circulatory disease compared with individuals without metabolic syndrome factors. In both all-cause and circulatory death models, relative risk was highest for the blood pressure risk factor. Based on a modified NCEP definition, increased mortality risk is associated with metabolic syndrome in an insured lives cohort and has life insurance mortality pricing implications.     

"What we need is a crop ecologist": ecology and agricultural science in Progressive-era America

Though they are often seen as foils for each other, ecology and agricultural science co-evolved. With shared roots in late nineteenth-century botany, ecologists and agronomists fostered important connections during the Progressive era that have been largely overlooked despite a number of finely nuanced studies of ecology's origins. But if 'applied ecology' once effectively meant agriculture, over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century the relationship between ecology and scientific agriculture grew strained. Agriculturists narrowed their focus to increasing yields, and ecologists sought to establish their discipline as a distant theoretical science and so distanced themselves from its agricultural applications. By the end of World War I, the process of disciplinary specialization was well underway. In time, the two disciplines diverged so completely that the once vital connections between them were obscured and forgotten.     

Board Committee Meetings and Firm Financial Performance: An Investigation of Australian Companies

This article examines how the frequency of board committee meetings impacts on Australian firms' financial performance. Data were collected from 118 Australian listed companies – including 26 financial firms and 92 nonfinancial firms – for the period 1999–2007. Analysis of that data shows that the frequencies of audit committee meetings and remuneration committee meetings are positively and significantly associated with return on equity and return on assets. The frequencies of risk committee meetings do not show any significant effects on the financial performance of Australian firms. Estimated results are found to be robust after controlling for internal as well as external governance mechanisms that might affect Australian firm performance.     

Globalization,Financial Liberalization and the Behavior of the Long Run Money Demand in the Bangladesh Economy

ABSTRACT

The paper estimates the long run demand for money function in the Bangladesh economy using cointegration and the Vector Error Correction Modeling (VECM) technique. The cointegration results suggest that although the process of globalization has shown no significant impact on money demand by the fact that the foreign interest rate is seen as statistically not significant, the financial liberalization has an important impact, reflected in the statistically significant role of domestic interest rate, in influencing both M1 and M2 money demand. An estimate of VECMs also reveals the fact that the short run speed of adjustment is moderately influenced by the financial reform measures to establish the long run relation between money balances, income and domestic interest rates. The phenomenon of credit constraint in the context of a developing country has shown no significant role in influencing money demand, which may imply that the stage of financial development is getting higher level in the Bangladesh economy. The existence of exchange rate depreciation in the cointegration relation with the expected sign suggests that currency substitution is now effective in the monetary sector and, therefore, its impact should be considered in the Bangladesh monetary policy matrix.     

Sustainability Risk Disclosure Practices of Listed Companies in Australia

This paper investigates the extent to which the top 100 ASX listed companies disclosed economic, environmental and social sustainability risk factors during the 2014/15 financial year in light of the changes introducing Recommendation 7.4 to the third edition of the Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations in 2014. While all companies complied with the Recommendation, questions of substance over form were raised because some companies had risks that were not disclosed according to Recommendation 7.4. Our conclusion outlines how this research contributes to the growing literature on sustainability and corporate governance. We add to the continuing debate on mandatory versus voluntary disclosures, advocating that Australia may need to introduce mandatory guidelines, beyond the ASX, to regulate the disclosure of material economic, environmental and social risks. Additionally, we conclude that Recommendation 7.4 is unlikely to substantially change Australian corporate reporting and disclosure practices – that, for most companies, it is ‘business as usual’. However, under business as usual, we can naturally expect to see further increases in sustainability and alternative reporting frameworks, such as integrated reporting, as well as increasing use of the Internet to report and disclose sustainability risks.     

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.     

Three measures of East Asian currency evaluation

One of the prominent explanations for the East Asian financial crises of 1997 relies upon East Asian currency overvaluation. However, most empirical studies of these crises do not undertake serious examination of whether these currencies were overvalued. In this article, three major approaches to identifying the equilibrium exchange rate are implemented: long-run purchasing power parity (PPP), a productivity-based model, and a monetary model of the nominal exchange rate. The PPP calculations indicate that as of May 1997, the Hong Kong dollar, baht, ringgit, and peso were overvalued, and the won undervalued. In a framework that explicitly accounts for the role of productivity, substantial overvaluation of the peso is detected, but an undervaluation of the won is also uncovered. Misalignments of the ringgit and baht are small. Finally, the estimated equilibrium rates from a monetary model do not imply much deviation from short-run equilibrium at the end of June 1997. A conclusion of substantial overvaluation on the eve of the East Asian currency turmoil is not very plausible, suggesting that some alternate mechanism for generating crises - other than one involving the conventional macroeconomic fundamentals - was at work.     

Interfuel substitution in Australia: a way forward to achieve environmental sustainability

This paper examines the possibilities for interfuel substitution in Australia in view of the need to shift towards a cleaner mix of fuels and technologies to meet future energy demand and environmental goals. The translog cost function is estimated for the aggregate economy, the manufacturing sector and its subsectors, and the electricity generation subsector. The advantages of this work over previous literature relating to the Australian case are that it uses relatively recent data, focuses on energy‐intensive subsectors and estimates the Morishima elasticities of substitution. The empirical evidence shown herein indicates weak‐form substitutability between different energy types, and higher possibilities for substitution at lower levels of aggregation, compared with the aggregate economy. For the electricity generation subsector, which is at the centre of the CO₂ emissions problem in Australia, significant but weak substitutability exists between coal and gas when the price of coal changes. A higher substitution possibility exists between coal and oil in this subsector. The evidence for the own‐ and cross‐price elasticities, together with the results for fuel efficiencies, indicates that a large increase in relative prices could be justified to further stimulate the market for low‐emission technologies.     

Engineering bureaucracy: the genesis of formal policies, positions, and structures in high-technology firms

This article examines the impact of organizational foundingconditions on several facets of bureaucratization - managerialintensity, the proliferation of specialized managerial and administrativeroles, and formalization of employment relations. Analyzinginformation on a sample of technology start-ups in California'sSilicon Valley, we characterize the organizational models orblueprints espoused by founders in creating new enterprises.We find that those models and the social composition of thelabor force at the time of founding had enduring effects ongrowth in managerial intensity (i.e., reliance on managerialand administrative specialists) over time. Our analysis thusprovide compelling evidence of path dependence in the evolutionof bureaucracy - even in a context in which firms face intenseselection pressures - and underscore the importance of the 'logicsof organizing' that founders bring to new enterprises. We findless evidence that founding models exert persistent effectson the formalization of employment relations or on the proliferationof specialized senior management titles. Rather, consistentwith neo-institutional perspectives on organizations, thosesuperficial facets of bureaucracy appear to be shaped by theneed to satisfy external gatekeepers (venture capitalists andthe constituents of public corporations), as well as by exigenciesof organizational scale, growth, and aging. We discuss someimplications of these results for efforts to understand thevarieties, determinants, and consequences of bureaucracy.