During the past two decades financial systems world-wide have developed rapidly in terms of size, industry structure, and the range of products and services produced. In Australia the size of the financial system, measured by total assets, has approximately doubled relative to nominal GDP in the past twenty years, while in a number of other countries the growth has been even more dramatic. More...

A market orientation (MO) has long been an essential concept in marketing discipline. Advanced information technologies show a great potential for information acquisition, sharing, and dissemination, all of which are the essential processes of an MO. This paper proposes a framework of an Internet-mediated market orientation (IMO), in which the Internet functions as a transformer of the traditio...

We consider the existence of radially symmetric non-negative solutions for the boundary value problem -Au(x) = lf{u(x)) IMI < 1, x e RN{N > 2) u(x) = 0 ||*|| = 1 where X > 0, f(0) < 0 (non-positone), /' > 0 and / is superlinear. We establish existence of non-negative solutions for A small which extends some work of our previous paper on non-positone problems, where we considered the case N = \ ...

Some firms (such as Intel and Medtronics) use a time–pacing strategy for new product development, introducing new generations at regular intervals. If the firm adopts a fast pace (introducing frequently) then it prematurely cannibalizes its old generation and incurs high development costs, while if it waits too long, it fails to capitalize on customer willingness–to– pay for more advanced techn...

In this brief, the margin of stability of two-dimensional (2D) discrete systems is considered. A new method to compute the stability margin of 2-D continuous systems is provided. Illustrative examples are also included.

BACKGROUND During the 1990's hospitals in the U.S were faced with cost containment charges, which may have disproportionately impacted hospitals that serve poor patients. The purposes of this paper are to study the impact of safety net activities on total profit margins and operating expenditures, and to trace these relationships over the 1990s for all U.S urban hospitals, controlling for hospi...

The three most recent downturns, in contrast with other post-war recessions, are characterized by slow recoveries in employment despite positive economic growth. I find that recent recoveries coincide with high uncertainty about economy-wide corporate profits at a time when output begins to rebound, a pattern that was not observed in the earlier recessions. To examine the role of uncertainty in...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether cost containment has been affected by recent pharmaceutical reimbursement reforms that have been introduced in the Spanish health care system over the period 1996-2002, under the conservative Popular Party Government. Four main reimbursement policies can be observed in the Spanish pharmaceutical market after 1996, each of them largely unintegrated with...