ANTITRUST TREATMENT OF NONPROFITS: SHOULD HOSPITALS RECEIVE SPECIAL CARE?

Nonprofit hospitals receive favorable tax treatment in exchange for providing socially beneficial activities. Extending this rationale suggests that nonprofit hospital mergers should be evaluated differently than mergers of for-profit hospitals because suppression of competition may also allow nonprofits to cross-subsidize care for the poor. Using detailed California data, we find no evidence that nonprofit hospitals are more likely than for-profit hospitals to provide more charity care or offer unprofitable services in response to an increase in market power. Therefore, we find no empirical justification for applying, as some courts have suggested, different antitrust standards for nonprofit hospitals. (JEL I11, L1, L44)     

‘Becoming familiar with a world’: a relational view of socialization

Ethnographic data have frequently been used to examine socialization, but rarely to ground theories of socialization. This paper is an exception. Interest in indigenous representations emerging in situations involving socialization has led to the building of a relational model of socialization, which contrasts with mainstream developmental models of this phenomenon. Socialization is generally defined in terms of cultural learning, the internalization of culture or culture acquisition, that is in terms of the individual's development. The present paper defines it in terms of becoming familiar with a new ‘world’, and a series of changes affecting the structure of the relationship between the human agent and this new world. These structural changes include immersion in a world that is at first strange; subjection to the authority of this world on the basis of acceptance of this authority; and involvement in the world's everyday life structures and activities through doing.     

Gambler’s Ruin: The Duration of Play

We study the gambler’s ruin problem with a general distribution of the payoffs in each game. Assuming the expected value of the payoff distribution is negative, so that eventual ruin occurs with probability 1, we are interested in the distribution of the duration to ruin, also known as the first-passage time distribution. A generating function for this distribution is obtained. Exact expressions for the expected value and variance of this distribution, as well as asymptotic expressions for the case of large initial wealth, are derived.     

The Valued Child. In Search of a Latent Attitude Profile that Influences the Transition to Motherhood

In this research, a latent class analysis is used to identify latent attitude profiles that influence the transition to the first child. We argue that ideational theories, i.e. the Second Demographic Transition theory and the extended model of Planned Behaviour, often refer to a broad range of attitudes or values that are hypothesized to influence behaviour, and as such describe an attitude or value profile that inhibits vs. fosters the likelihood of motherhood. The results demonstrate the usefulness of a latent class approach and reveal that quite different latent attitude profiles may lead to an increased likelihood of motherhood. However, only one latent attitude profile clearly inhibited the hazard of a first birth, i.e. an egalitarian profile that dissociates with “traditional” views on familistic issues regarding marriage, children, partnership and household roles, and at the same time stresses the importance of autonomy and independence.     

Liquid advocacy: Social welfare advocacy in neoliberal times

This article examines current inconsistent trends in social welfare advocacy literature. Some studies show evidence of widespread engagement in advocacy by nonprofit organisations, while other studies conversely offer evidence of limited advocacy activities. Another controversial aspect stems from the question whether governmental funding undermines the extent to which nonprofits engage in advocacy. We argue that these findings reflect the contradictory impact of neoliberal governance on social welfare advocacy. The article highlights and discusses three interrelated components of neoliberalism and their impact on current social welfare advocacy: marketisation, precariousness and commodification. Neoliberalism has propelled a model of market-driven civil society that has remade the practice of social welfare advocacy in contradictory ways. With its complex rationales, neoliberalism has simultaneously undermined the ability of nonprofits to engage in advocacy but in a paradoxical way has also created conditions that induce these organisations to practice advocacy. Implications for practice and research on social welfare advocacy are discussed.     

Sparsely clustered survival data: application to the evaluation of the safety and effectiveness of medical devices

The effectiveness and safety of implantable medical devices is a critical public health concern. We consider analysis of data in which it is of interest to compare devices but some individuals may be implanted with two or more devices. Our motivating example is based on orthopedic devices, where the same individual can be implanted with as many as two devices for the same joint but on different sides of the body, referred to as bilateral cases. Different methods of analysis are considered in a simulation study and real data example, including both marginal and conditional survival models, fitting single and separate models for bilateral and non-bilateral cases, and combining estimates from these two models. The results of simulations suggest that in the context of orthopedic devices, where implants failures are rare, models fit on both bilateral and non-bilateral cases simultaneously could be quite misleading, and that combined estimates from fitting two separate models performed better under homogeneity. A real data example illustrates the issues surrounding analysis of orthopedic device data with bilateral cases. Our findings suggest that research studies of orthopedic devices should at minimum consider fitting separate models to bilateral and non-bilateral cases.     

Can World System Theory predict news flow on twitter? The case of government-sponsored broadcasting

Social media platforms provide world governments with the opportunity to distribute news content from their broadcast channels directly to foreign publics [Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world system. New York: Academic Press] World System Theory, which has successfully explained and predicted the structure of international news flow, is now being challenged. Specifically, these social platforms undermined assumptions regarding the one-way flow of information toward audiences and the exclusive institutional nature of the players in the international system. This study examines the unique case of government-sponsored news media and its international news flow. It finds that while the structure of the international news flow on Twitter exhibits a hierarchical core–periphery structure, non-institutional actors (e.g. bloggers) conformed less than institutional players (e.g. governments and news media) to that structure. This study also found that non-institutional actors assumed the role of bridging news sources and audiences, a role traditionally reserved for a small minority of elite news media. The growing and diversified pool of information mediators resulted in a more fragmented network of news flow, siloed, rather than interconnected. Research findings are synthesized and analyzed in the context of international broadcasting and social media scholarship.