The advances made in life-sustaining technology over the last twenty years have permitted the prolongation of biological life with questionable outcomes. Patients' experiences with pain, suffering, indignity and financial burdens have forced the medical community to reconsider sustaining life at all costs. Currently this reconsideration has issued into the acceptance of quality-of-life (QoL) cr...

This paper considers the implications of increasing land supply constraints in the United States on urban demand. First, because shifts in demand are now capitalized more into the price of land, house prices in some metropolitan areas have grown increasingly unaffordable to typical households. This might have an effect on the fundamental character of such cities. Second, the effect of home owne...

INTRODUCTION Less developed countries, Vietnam included, face serious challenges of inefficient diagnosis, inaccessibility to healthcare facilities, and high medical expenses. Information on medical costs, technical and professional capabilities of healthcare providers and service deliveries becomes influential when it comes to patients' decision on choices of healthcare providers. METHODS Th...

Healthcare provider organizations are faced with a rising number of financial pressures. Both administrators and physicians need help analyzing large numbers of clinical and financial data when making decisions. To assist them, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center and Hitachi America, Ltd. (HAL), Inc., have partnered to build an enterprise data warehouse and perform a series of case stud...

The chair of the session, Jayati Ghosh (IDEAs and JNU), delivered the welcome address saying that the past two years have seen a lot of financial turbulence with gloomy as well as optimistic predictions about what is going to happen, alternating in their phases. This culminated in a renewed phase of optimism when many believed that things were almost back to normal except for a few hiccups on t...

U.S. healthcare organizations face unprecedented financial pressures, making it more difficult than ever to maintain the vital re-investment capital required to sustain high levels of care and improve operating efficiency. More than 34% of hospitals reported operating losses for the first half of 2009 and more than 70% of healthcare organizations have slowed down or canceled capital projects as...

The Mckinnon-Shaw Hypothesis, in its’ various forms, is now thirty years old. Over that period literally hundreds of empirical studies have been completed examining the hypothesis in many different contexts. Initially, the hypothesis focused on the effects of so-called “Financial Repression” (low or negative real interest rates) on savings and investment levels in developing countries. In more ...

BACKGROUND Universal health coverage is high on national health agendas of many countries at the moment. Absence of financial hardship is a key component of universal health coverage and should be monitored regularly. However, relevant household survey data, which is traditionally needed for this analysis is not frequently collected in most countries and in some countries, has not been collecte...

We use evidence from a natural experiment in Greece to study the effect of the announcement of austerity measures on road traffic accidents (RTAs). We use daily RTA data from 2010 and 2011, during which a number of austerity measures were announced, including salary and pension cuts and an increase in direct and indirect taxes. We find that controlling for other factors potentially influencing ...

Article history: Received 17 January 2014 Received in revised form 28 May 2014 Accepted 29 May 2014 Available online 12 June 2014 This article investigates the impact of the observation that managers can use cash to defer bankruptcy on default risk and corporate financial policies. I show that with managerial cash use to defer default, the impact of cash on default risk depends on two opposing ...