Differences in facilities' acceptance of patients under long-term care insurance in Japan

OBJECTIVES: In April 2000, Japan launched a public, long-term care insurance (LTCI) plan for elderly people who need support. This study describes how medical support for the elderly is delivered at LTCI care facilities in Japan now and gaps between system goals and current activity. Recommendations are made for enhancing the implementation of LTCI. METHODS: We mailed questionnaires to all health service facilities for the elderly (HSF) and special nursing homes for the elderly (SNH) located in the Kyushu area of Japan, asking whether they would accept patients with nine specific conditions. RESULTS: We found that HSFs, which are required to employ a full-time doctor and are reimbursed at a higher rate, accept significantly fewer patients with four conditions that need medical support than are accepted by SNHs, which are not required to employ a full-time doctor. DISCUSSION: In this study, we find discrepancies between system goals and current activities at LTCI care facilities. For the Japanese LTCI system to work well in the limitation of medical resources, we must understand how it really works and to reform the system continuously.     

Bayes admissible estimation of the means in Poisson decomposable graphical models

We investigate the Bayes estimation of the means in Poisson decomposable graphical models. Some classes of Bayes estimators are provided which improve on the maximum likelihood estimator under the normalized squared error loss. Both proper and improper priors are included in the proposed classes of priors. Concerning the generalized Bayes estimators with respect to the improper priors, we address their admissibility.     

THE EFFECTS OF ASSET PURCHASES AND NORMALIZATION OF U.S. MONETARY POLICY

This paper examines changes in the effects of unconventional monetary policies in the United States. To this end, we estimate a Markov-switching VAR model with absorbing regimes to capture possible structural changes. Our results detect regime changes around the beginning of 2011 and the middle of 2013. Before 2011, the U.S. large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) had relatively large impacts on the real economy and prices, but after the middle of 2013, their effects were weaker and less-persistent. In addition, after the middle of 2013, which includes the monetary policy normalization period, the asset purchase (or balance sheet) shocks had slightly weaker effects than during the early stage of the LSAPs but stronger effects than during the late stage of the LSAPs, while interest rate shocks had insignificant effects on the real economy and prices. Finally, our results suggest that the positive responses of durables and capital goods expenditures to interest rate shocks weakened the negative impacts of interest rate hikes after the middle of 2013 including the period of monetary policy normalization. (JEL C32, E21, E52)     

Neutralized Hegemonic Banter: The Persistence of Sexist and Racist Joking Among Undergraduate Students

Using a mixed methods approach, this article explores factors that contribute to undergraduate students' beliefs about the harm caused by racist and sexist jokes. Quantitative results indicate that, net of other demographic control variables, college men are less likely to agree that sexist and racist jokes are harmful. Qualitative findings shed light on this pattern via a process we call neutralized hegemonic banter. By connecting students' perspectives about the perceived harm caused by racist and sexist jokes with their larger campus experiences, we extend the literature and demonstrate the role that hegemonic masculinity plays in normalizing racist and sexist joking.     

Continuity and egalitarianism in the evaluation of infinite utility streams

There exists a utilitarian tradition à la Sidgwick of treating equal generations equally. Diamond showed that there exists no social evaluation ordering over infinite utility streams in the presence of the Pareto principle, the Sidgwick principle, and continuity. Instead of requiring the Sidgwick principle of procedural fairness, we focus on two principles of distributional egalitarianism along the line of the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle and the Lorenz domination principle, and show that there exists no social evaluation relation satisfying one of these egalitarian principles and the weakened continuity and rationality axioms even in the absence of the Pareto principle. This paper is a substantially revised version of our foregoing paper, “On the Possibility of Continuous, Paretian and Egalitarian Evaluation of Infinite Utility Streams,” which was based on our joint research conducted as a part of the Project on Intergenerational Equity under the auspices of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. Thanks are due to Geir Asheim, Kaushik Basu, Walter Bossert, Hajime Hori, Tomoki Inoue, Mitsunori Noguchi and Koichi Tadenuma with whom we had several discussions on this and related issues. We are also grateful to the anonymous referees and the Associate Editor in charge of our earlier paper for their helpful comments and suggestions. Needless to say, no one other than ourselves should be held responsible for any remaining defect of this paper.     

STUDENT DISTRESS IN A WEB-BASED DISTANCE EDUCATION COURSE

Many advocates of computer-mediated distance education emphasize its positive aspects and understate the kinds of communicative and technical capabilities and work required by students and faculty. There are few systematic analytical studies of students who have experienced new technologies in higher education. This article presents a qualitative case study of a small graduate-level web-based distance education course at a major US university.This paper examines students' distressing experiences due to communication breakdowns and technical difficulties. This topic is glossed over in much of the distance education literature written for administrators, instructors and prospective students. The intent is that this study will enhance understanding of the instructional design issues, instructor and student preparation, and communication practices that are needed to improve web-based distance education courses.     

Co-constructing controversy: content analysis of collaborative knowledge negotiation in online communities

Knowledge sharing online has flourished within organizations as well as open online communities due to the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 platforms. This paper builds on previous studies of social construction of knowledge online and investigates how contributors in online communities collaboratively share and construct controversial scientific knowledge. As the general public participates in such knowledge collaboration, understanding the processes through which they contribute content and roles that they play is imperative. The authors conducted the content analysis of three online communities that engage in knowledge collaboration on the subject of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccination, which is perceived as contentious knowledge by the public due to the widespread myth among parents that the MMR vaccine is associated with autism. The study's findings include that the content discussed is influenced by the purposes of the communities, nature of the tasks, and demographics of participants, although they discussed the same topic. The authors also found that the framework of knowledge reuse and knowledge co-construction sites is useful for investigating the content and roles that appeared in the three communities. The contribution of the paper includes the analytical framework of knowledge reuse and knowledge co-construction, articulation of the content and roles that appeared in online communities, and unboxing of discourses in three different online communities. Future research directions are also discussed.     

Dynamic wetland mosaic environments and Asian openbill habitat creation in peri-urban Bangkok

Urban Ecosystems - This study examined the spatial relationships between various types of wetland and the distribution of Asian openbills (Anastomus oscitans) as an indicator species in a...     

Existence of Equilibria in Economies with Bads

We consider an exchange economy in which there are infinitely many consumers and some commodities are bads, that is, cause disutility to consumers. We give an example of such an economy for which there is no competitive equilibrium or its variants (quasi‐ or pseudo‐equilibrium), and an example of the failure of the so‐called uniform integrability condition of equilibrium allocations of increasingly populous finite economies.