Project agreements and government procurement

I discuss the recent proliferation of mandatory project labor agreements in government procurement, some of the ensuing litigation, and the effects of such agreements on contractors, workers, and the public.     

Efficiency in religious organizations

Churches must realize that the management of their human resources is critical. The U.S. Catholic Church in recent years has been this problem take on even more significance with the apparent shortage of priests. This article considers this problem in light of a relatively new methodology, data envelopment analysis, which compares organizations to comparable best-practice units. The authors conclude that the Church would benefit from a better distribution of priests, both within and across dioceses. They also conclude that the use of deacons and priestless parishes can be effective in some circumstances.     

Political–economic equilibrium when parties represent constituents: The unidimensional case

 A political–economic environment is studied in which two parties, representing different constituencies of citizens, compete over a proportional tax rate to be levied on private endowments, to finance a public good. Although parties know the distribution of citizen traits (preferences and endowments), they are uncertain about the distribution of traits among the citizens who will turn up at the polls. This uncertainty engenders an endogenously derived function π(t ₁, t ₂) giving the probability that any one tax policy t ₁ will defeat another t ₂ in the election. Equilibrium existence theorems are proved, and the nature of equilibrium is compared with the equilibrium that exists when Downsian parties (ones whose objective is to maximize the probability of victory) face uncertainty. Both constituency-representing parties and uncertainty are needed to generate equilibria in which parties propose different policies. Received: 4 April 1995/Accepted: 2 April 1996     

An appraisal of organizational response to fiscally constraining regulation: the case of hospitals and DRGs

Results from analysis of 227,771 discharge abstracts from 68 short-term, acute-care hospitals and from interviews with a stratified random selection of 24 of the 68 chief executives of these hospitals demonstrate that institutions perceive implementation of DRGs as fiscally constraining, especially in light of other resource-constraining conditions (an increase in unemployment resulting in fewer people with hospitalization insurance, in addition to severe cuts in Medicaid rolls and budget). Hospitals responded to DRGs by decreasing the use of affected resources or services available to the hospitalized Medicare patient. In order to survive a more economically stringent marketplace, hospitals no longer protected the traditional core within the Medicare inpatient market. They opted instead to change practices and products at the unregulated margins of the DRG system.     

Discerning the epidemiology of drug use among a sample of college students

Although estimates concerning the prevalence of various forms of substance abuse vary considerably, it is critical to note that even the more conservative estimates indicate a major public health problem. Furthermore, increased drug experimentation has been frequently associated with the college experience. Utilizing a slightly modified version of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Monitoring the Future Survey, the present study examined the epidemiology of self-reported drug taking behaviors (e.g., alcohol, marijuana, tranquilizers, stimulants, psychedelics, etc.) among a sample (n = 683) of students attending a major public university. Data analyses focused on the specific settings and social groupings in which drug use occurred as well as on the frequency and type(s) of drug taking behaviors. Based on the results yielded from a disjoint cluster analysis, four distinct groups of drug users were identified. These four groups then served as categories of the dependent variable in a discriminant function analysis. A general linear models procedure was employed to identify the more efficacious discriminating (i.e., independent) variables.