Two hospice patients and the roles of the physician and the physician executive

Hospice care is available nearly everywhere. Yet some physicians aren't aware of its role in end-of-life care. Explore what hospice care provides and how patients and their families may benefit.     

Islamic Rule and the Empowerment of the Poor and Pious

Does Islamic political control affect women's empowerment? Several countries have recently experienced Islamic parties coming to power through democratic elections. Due to strong support among religious conservatives, constituencies with Islamic rule often tend to exhibit poor women's rights. Whether this reflects a causal relationship or a spurious one has so far gone unexplored. I provide the first piece of evidence using a new and unique data set of Turkish municipalities. In 1994, an Islamic party won multiple municipal mayor seats across the country. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, I compare municipalities where this Islamic party barely won or lost elections. Despite negative raw correlations, the RD results reveal that, over a period of six years, Islamic rule increased female secular high school education. Corresponding effects for men are systematically smaller and less precise. In the longer run, the effect on female education remained persistent up to 17 years after, and also reduced adolescent marriages. An analysis of long‐run political effects of Islamic rule shows increased female political participation and an overall decrease in Islamic political preferences. The results are consistent with an explanation that emphasizes the Islamic party's effectiveness in overcoming barriers to female entry for the poor and pious.     

Governance Reforms: the Good,the Bad,and the Ugly; and the Sound: Examining the Past and Exploring the Future of Public Organizations

This paper addresses governance reforms of the last three and a half decades and looks into the future. This is done in three parts. The first part presents a birds-eye view of the massive literature on governance and governance reforms with a focus on the good, the bad, and ugly sides, then in part two argues for an alternative concept or theory of “sound governance” with characteristics and dimensions that overcome the deficiencies of other models of governance. As a consequence of reforms, the third part examines the past and explores the future of public organizations via “going home” as a conclusion with possible scenarios, challenges, and opportunities.     

税费改革后乡镇党委政府的退与进

农村实行税费改革特别是免征农业税后,对乡镇党委政府的工作重心提出了新的要求。最近,我深入到全县16个乡镇、30多个村,采取集体座谈、个别走访等形式,就乡镇党委政府如何在新的政策背景下实现职能转换进行了调查。通过调查,我认为,税费改革后,乡镇党委政府的工作必须有退亦有进,做到审势而退、乘势而进。审势而退乡镇党委政府要突破传统的思维定式和工作模式,从税费征收、行政干预农业生产和主导农村社会事务等领域退出来。一要从直接从事税费征收中退出来。受计划经济体制积弊的影响,长期以来,税费本应是由经营户按照相关政策自主交纳的,…     

发挥互动效应统筹城乡发展

县域经济是国民经济的基本组成部分,具有以农村人口为主和城镇与农村并存的特点。农村经济与城镇经济是相互联系、相互依赖、相互补充、相互促进的。从一定意义上说,县域经济的发展进程就是城乡互动的过程,就是统筹城乡经济发展的过程,其主线应是城乡资源的优化配置,重视工农、城乡协调发展,从而充分发挥城市对农村的带动作用和农村对城市的促进作用。目前,城镇发     

Residual Wage Inequality and Immigration in the USA and the UK

This paper assesses the effects of immigration on the increasing residual wage inequality in the USA and UK from 1994 to 2008. It does so by using an extension of the Lemieux (2006) methodology, whereby counterfactual residual variances are constructed to account not only for composition effects (changes in education‐experience of the workforce), but also for increasing immigration in the labour force. The empirical analysis reveals that residual wage inequality is higher among immigrants than among natives. However, increase in immigration does not seem to represent the major force behind the increase in residual wage inequality for the USA and for the UK.     

汉高祖和汉文帝是如何使用老实人与不老实人的

人确实可以分成老实人与不老实人,而且在做人上,老实人确实更让人放心,人们在感情上也更容易接受老实人.但是,老实人并非十全十美,不老实人也并不一定都是奸人和坏人.一般情况下,老实人与不老实人只是为人处事的风格不同和个性上有差异,因而不能简单地将之作为政治上取舍评判的标准.用人在坚持德的根本标准的前提下,关键是要因才使用,便之各尽其长、各得其所.汉高祖和汉文帝在历史上都是以雄才大略和辉煌功业彪炳于世的,他们对老实人与不老实人的使用方法及其效果能给我们一些有益的启示.     

Stress, the press, the baby and the bathwater

The most important service rendered by the press is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Samuel Butler, 1835-1902 English novelist and satirist     

领导预期与实际效果产生偏差的原因及纠偏之术

领导预期与实际效果产生偏差,主要表现为预期目标无法达成、预期效果没有实现、预期进度没有跟上等。组织环境变化、信息传递阻塞、行动方案不合理和决策执行不到位等是造成这一问题的主要原因。应通过提升环境感知能力、疏通信息传输通道、优化决策方案制订和强化组织执行能力等来纠正偏差。     

论领导科学与管理科学的联系与区别

有关领导科学与管理科学的联系与区别，前些年一些刊物上已有为数不少的文章论及，有过很多很好的见解。但是，它们都太过于集中在问题的外围层面上，以致到今天这一问题还没有明晰的结论，且已影响到领导科学的学科建设。领导科学与管理科学是两门似曾相识但内质不同的科学。就“似曾相识”而言，它们都是研究人与人、人与事、人与物关系的科学，且它们框架相近，论述形式相仿，语言也有重叠。但两门学科在内质上而不是在外围的“划片”、“圈地”上，有显见的不同。第一，基本矛盾不同。基本矛盾或者说根本矛盾，是学科区分的依据。基本矛…     

经济转型与我国中央—地方关系制度变迁

我国中央—地方关系制度变迁与经济体制转型紧密联系 ,其路径体现为:由计划经济模式下的中央政府推进转向双轨制下地方政府推进 ,最终过渡到市场推进下的中央—地方关系制度变迁。我国中央—地方关系的死乱循环本质上是经济制度的不稳定状态在政府体制上的一种折射 ,因此应从战略角度出发构建完善的社会主义市场经济体制。只有完善的市场才能反馈供给并扩大中央—地方关系调整的社会资源总量 ,构筑国家能力提升的战略基础。     

Katrina and the Governors

The Katrina disaster is still having political repercussions in Louisiana and Mississippi. Conflicts over funding, development and redevelopment choices, and legal authority persist. Mississippi managed the disaster response better than Louisiana, but it is less certain which state is managing the recovery better. The recovery programs have been slow and contentious and it is uncertain whether they ultimately will reduce the risk of another Katrina-like disaster. Shortages of housing, particularly low- and middle-income housing and rental housing, continue. Closing the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet is reducing the risk to New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, but officials need to address the vulnerabilities of the levee system. The reorganization of FEMA’s recovery offices should help speed allocations of funds and improve relationships between the agency and state and local officials in the region. Louisiana has greatly improved its emergency management system, as evidenced by its accreditation, and Mississippi needs to follow suit.     

Clubs and the Market

This paper defines a general equilibrium model with exchange and club formation. Agents trade multiple private goods widely in the market, can belong to several clubs, and care about the characteristics of the other members of their clubs. The space of agents is a continuum, but clubs are finite. It is shown that (i) competitive equilibria exist, and (ii) the core coincides with the set of equilibrium states. The central subtlety is in modeling club memberships and expressing the notion that membership choices are consistent across the population.     

Dropping the Books and Working Off the Books

The paper empirically tests the relationship between underground labour and schooling achievement for Italy, a country ranking badly in both respects when compared with other high‐income economies, with a marked duality between North and South. In order to identify underground workers, we exploit the information on individuals' social security positions available from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth. After controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic and economic variables and addressing potential endogeneity and selection issues, we show that a low level of education sizeably and significantly increases the probability of working underground. Switching from completing compulsory school to graduating at college more than halves this probability for both men and women. The gain is slightly higher for individuals completing the compulsory track with respect to those having no formal education at all. The different probabilities found for self‐employed and dependent workers support the view of a dual informal sector, in which necessity and desirability coexist.     

Ambiguity in the Small and in the Large

This paper considers local and global multiple‐prior representations of ambiguity for preferences that are (i) monotonic, (ii) Bernoullian, that is, admit an affine utility representation when restricted to constant acts, and (iii) locally Lipschitz continuous. We do not require either certainty independence or uncertainty aversion. We show that the set of priors identified by Ghirardato, Maccheroni, and Marinacci's (2004) “unambiguous preference” relation can be characterized as a union of Clarke differentials. We then introduce a behavioral notion of “locally better deviation” at an act and show that it characterizes the Clarke differential of the preference representation at that act. These results suggest that the priors identified by these preference statements are directly related to (local) optimizing behavior.