Physician career management: organizational strategies for the 21st century.

Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long-term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding. It is not stress, per se, that causes burnout, as many thrive in stressful, demanding careers. Rather, burnout results when stress continuously outweighs the sense of effectiveness, accomplishment, and reward. And, this fate is sealed when one feels helpless to effect significant change in the conditions that fuel the stress. Establishing an organizational environment that reduces the risk of physician burnout requires a new commitment of resources, one that can be challenging to justify to decision-makers with a strictly short-term, bottom line orientation. The key issues to consider in shaping a physician career management program include: (1) entry of new physician employees into the organization; (2) productivity measures; (3) responsiveness to safety concerns; (4) administrative and policy issues; and (5) variety and growth opportunities.     

Clustering for contingency tables: boxes and partitions

The correspondence analysis (CA) method appears to be an effective tool for analysis of interrelations between rows and columns in two-way contingency data. A discrete version of the method, box clustering, is developed in the paper using an approximation version of the CA model extended to the case when CA factor values are required to be Boolean. Several properties of the proposed SEFIT-BOX algorithm are proved to facilitate interpretation of its output. It is also shown that two known partitioning algorithms (applied within row or column sets only) could be considered as locally optimal algorithms for fitting the model, and extensions of these algorithms to a simultaneous row and column partitioning problem are proposed.     

Labor union effects on innovative activity

Union rent-seeking is considered a tax on firm returns from investments in innovative activity. We examine this proposition by considering the responses of firms in a 1985 survey on R&D and product innovation. Consistent with our model, we find that innovative activity is significantly less important for union than for similar nonunion firms. We conclude that innovative activity may be an important route through which union rent-seeking affects the long-run performance of firms. We appreciate the helpful assistance and suggestions received from our colleague Terry Seaks, Barry Bozeman at Syracuse University, and participants in the Vanderbilt Microeconomics Workshop.     

A Nonparametric Test for Deviation from Randomness with Applications to Stock Market Index Data

The proposed test detects deviations from randomness, without a priori distributional assumption, when observations are not independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), which is suitable for our motivating stock market index data. Departures from i.i.d. are tested by subdividing data into subintervals and then using a conditional probability measure within intervals as a binomial test. This nonparametric test is designed to detect deviations of neighboring observations from randomness when the dataset consists of time series observations. Simulation results and a comparison with Lo and MacKinlay's (1988 Lo, A. W. and MacKinlay, A. C. 1988. Stock market prices do not follow random walks: Evidence from a simple specification test. The Review of Financial Studies, 1: 41–66. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) variance ratio test showed that our proposed test is a competitive alternative.     

Detecting Randomness: A Review of Existing Tests with New Comparisons

In this article we review and compare a number of existing tests for detecting randomness in time series data, with emphasis on stock market index data. By comparing variance ratio tests with traditional statistical tests, we have the most extensive simulation comparison of such procedures. The investigated tests are compared over a diverse group of distributions, models, and stock market applications. In our stock market data analysis, the choice of data transformation can have a noticeable effect on test results. This study provides the reader with a guide as to which test and transformation is most appropriate for their use.     

Entrepreneurial orientation in vertical alliances: joint product innovation and learning from allies

This paper clarifies how a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affects joint product innovation within a vertical alliance and how this is influenced by increasing technological uncertainty and the absorption of knowledge from the alliance partners. The results of a structural equation model with latent interactions on 171 firms in the manufacturing industry indicate that the focal firm’s EO increases joint innovation, although this positive effect declines when a high level of uncertainty increases. On the other hand, the ability to absorb partners’ knowledge increases joint product innovation. As such, this study’s results contribute to research in the field of vertical alliances, EO, and the theoretical foundation of a dynamic capability perspective.