We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium-sized firms in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin’s Q, and survival rates. Management practices also display significant cross-country differences, with U.S. firms on average...

The health insurance sector has been transformed in the past fifteen years, with managed care replacing indemnity insurance as the norm. This transformation was intended to change the nature of competition in the health care system so that market forces could be used to control costs. Empirical studies have shown that this objective has been met, as areas with high managed care penetration have...

Empirical evidence is thin, so one must reply on informed judgment, common sense, and theory when describing a high-quality health plan. Using this approach, a high-quality health plan would be characterized by excellence in the following areas: physician selection and development; health improvement; information systems; continuous quality improvement; cooperation with health care purchasers; ...

In 1993, Washington State enacted the Health Services Act of 1993 (HSA) to guarantee universal access to health care through an employer mandate, with caps on premiums as the primary cost-control mechanism. The HSA represents the Nation's first formal experiment with managed competition. This article reports the results of a case study of the HSA's implementation. The study concludes that the W...

BACKGROUND Managed competition was introduced into the health care system in several countries including the Netherlands, although effects of competition of both providers and health insurers on the price of health care are inconclusive. We investigated the association between competition of both providers (care groups) and health insurers and the price of disease management programmes (DMPs). ...

in the 2nd half of the 6th century a.h., when the isma'ili caliphate in egypt was in the worst political situation, a series of political sunni figures managed to reach the important position of vizara some times. they, who were sympathetic towards the sunni caliphate of abbasids in baghdad and eventually made the fatimid caliphate to fall, during their vizara for fatimid dynasty, had to h...