Policymakers, advocates, and scholars frequently make claims about how the American public sees ownership affecting the delivery of medical care. In this paper we provide a comprehensive assessment of how Americans think about nonprofit and for-profit ownership. We summarize findings from surveys fielded between 1985 and 2000 and supplement them with findings from a new survey. Most Americans b...

Tracking attendance is a necessity in a variety of contexts in the developing world: health programs, schools, government offices, and a litany of other milieux. While electronic attendance tracking systems exist and perform their core function well, they are expensive and offer little customizability. In this demonstration we present a fingerprint-based biometric attendance system which uses o...

Private ownership creates monopoly power, harming the dynamic efficiency of asset allocation. Common ownership improves allocative efficiency, but eliminates incentives to invest in the common value of assets. We propose a simple partial private ownership system, Harberger licensing, for public assets. Lessors self-assess a price at which they commit to sell the asset to any interested buyer an...

This article presents cross-country comparisons of trends in for-profit nursing home chains in Canada, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. Using public and private industry reports, the study describes ownership, corporate strategies, costs, and quality of the 5 largest for-profit chains in each country. The findings show that large for-profit nursing home chains are increasi...

We examine the operating performance of Thai firms after they go public. Overall, we find that their performance declines. We then explore the relationship between managerial ownership and the change in firm performance. We find that firms with ‘low’ and ‘high’ levels of managerial ownership experience positive relationships between managerial ownership and the change in performance (alignment-...

INTRODUCTION Although some view the ownership of firearms as a deterrent to crime, the relationship between population-level firearm ownership rates and violent criminal perpetration is unclear. The purpose of this study is to test the association between state-level firearm ownership and violent crime. METHODS State-level rates of household firearm ownership and annual rates of criminal acts...