Compliance Strategies and Regulatory Effectiveness of Performance-Based Regulation of Chemical Accident Risks

This paper investigates the role that performance-based regulations can play in linking a firm's environmental, health, and safety concerns with their corporate strategy. The specific focus is on the performance standards required by the Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) which require firms that store or use certain chemicals to develop a Risk Management Plan (RMP) for reducing the likelihood and impact of accidents at their plants. Data from a series of case studies and interviews of executives in chemical firms reveal that proactive companies integrated many of the requirements of the CAAA into their management systems prior to the regulatory requirements. Most of these firms tend to be large ones. Small firms often lack the resources to implement these regulations and hence have tended to have a more difficult time with compliance.     

Competence and Competitive Advantage: Towards a Dynamic Model

Over the last ten years the concept of ‘competence’ has emerged as a central concept for competitive strategy. Several rich theoretical streams have contributed an extensive array of frameworks, definitions and papers using the concept. There is now a need to integrate these many contributions. Indeed, some of the frustration expressed recently by academics may be due to the large volume of conversation and the low level of integration. A concept that is considered so useful that many writers have incorporated it in their work will be of little value if it takes on different meanings for every use. If competence is to be used to explain relationships among variables and to build richer understandings of the roots of competitive advantage, then the field needs to engage in a serious conversation that attempts to focus this concept. Competence needs to be understood in a way that is faithful to its theoretical roots, allows the multiple dimensions that underpin competitive advantage to be meaningfully integrated and is specific enough that meaningful differences can emerge when used as a variable in empirical research. This paper seeks to begin a conversation toward that end by presenting a conceptualization that meets all of these requirements. The paper builds its conceptualization around satisfying the elements of a dynamic model of the relationship between competence and competitive advantage.     

The problems of eligibility and endogenous confounders when assessing the mortality impact of a nationwide disease-prevention programme: the case of insecticide-treated nets in Togo

Evaluation of the mortality impact of nationwide disease-prevention efforts is complicated by potential endogeneity: programme recipients may have unobserved characteristics that simultaneously make them both more likely to become recipients and more likely to survive as a result of other health practices. This population-based study assesses the mortality impact of a nationwide programme that distributed insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) to mothers of children aged 9-59 months in Togo. By comparing mortality rates before and after the programme according to households' eligibility status, we demonstrate that a one-time programme that restricts eligibility to households with a surviving child excludes some households with a high risk of child mortality. We then apply simultaneous estimation models to untangle the mortality impact of ITNs from the effects of unobserved confounders and show that among eligible households, living in a household with ITNs significantly reduces mortality for children aged 20-59 months, even after controlling for endogeneity.     

Is There a Place for Virtual Poverty Funds in Pro‐Poor Public Spending Reform? Lessons from Uganda's PAF

Various developing countries with weak public expenditure management systems are establishing virtual poverty funds (VPFs), drawing on the experience of Uganda's Poverty Action Fund. As a mechanism for tagging and tracking the performance of specific poverty‐reducing expenditures in the budget, a VPF can be useful. However, this article argues that such devices should be treated from the outset as transitional, and as part of wider processes of strengthening public expenditure management; otherwise, they can seriously distort public expenditure allocations and management systems, potentially undermining growth. Emphasis needs to be placed on identifying the right balance of expenditures in the entire budget; improving the effectiveness and efficiency of existing allocations; and developing better public‐sector policies for promoting pro‐poor private sector growth.     

Social relationships and shifting languages in Northern Thailand1

This paper explores how speakers’ understandings of the conduct of social relationships mediate changing and socially distinctive syncretic language practices in a Northern Thai community. Although a shift away from vernacular (Kam Muang) speech styles to Standard Thai was emblematically tied to young and urban speakers in nostalgic discourses, syncretic speech styles and metalinguistic discourses also reflected local and socially positioned understandings of institutional roles and social relationships. I argue that scholars of language change and shift should foreground the mediating role of social relationships in speakers’ uses and understandings of their communicative repertoires across multiple timescales.     

One Decade of Self Exclusion: Missouri Casino Self-Excluders Four to Ten Years after Enrollment

For more than a decade, casinos around the world have offered self-exclusion programs (SEPs) to gamblers seeking help with their gambling behavior. Despite the proliferation of SEPs, little is known about the long-term outcomes for gamblers who utilize these programs. The current study assessed the experiences of a sample (N = 113) of Missouri self-excluders (SEs) for as long as 10 years after their initial enrollment in the Missouri Voluntary Exclusion Program (MVEP). Most SEs had positive experiences with MVEP and reduced their gambling and gambling problems after enrollment. However, 50% of SEs who attempted to trespass at Missouri casinos after enrollment were able to, indicating that the benefit of MVEP was attributable more to the act of enrollment than enforcement. SEs who engaged in complementary treatment or self-help groups had more positive outcomes than those who did not, suggesting that SEPs ought to encourage and provide information about additional support and treatment options to participants.     

Thirty Years of Lottery Public Health Research: Methodological Strategies and Trends

Cognitive measurement techniques, such as self-reports of behavior and reaction time measures, largely dominate the field of psychological research. It is uncommon for researchers to examine a phenomenon of interest by observing actual behavior within natural settings. To illustrate the existence of this methodological trend for gambling research, this article reviews systematically selected samples of the peer-reviewed literature related to lottery gambling in general and the literature related to pathological gambling and lottery more specifically. The results indicate that self-report surveys dominate the extant lottery literature, and experimental investigations of video lottery terminal gambling supplement those papers. This landscape encourages researchers to expand their methodological approaches to the study of lottery gambling. Currently, we know more about what research participants tell us they do with respect to lottery gambling than we do about their real-life lottery gambling behavior.     

Bias and precision of measures of survival gain from right‐censored data

In cost‐effectiveness analyses of drugs or health technologies, estimates of life years saved or quality‐adjusted life years saved are required. Randomised controlled trials can provide an estimate of the average treatment effect; for survival data, the treatment effect is the difference in mean survival. However, typically not all patients will have reached the endpoint of interest at the close‐out of a trial, making it difficult to estimate the difference in mean survival. In this situation, it is common to report the more readily estimable difference in median survival. Alternative approaches to estimating the mean have also been proposed. We conducted a simulation study to investigate the bias and precision of the three most commonly used sample measures of absolute survival gain – difference in median, restricted mean and extended mean survival – when used as estimates of the true mean difference, under different censoring proportions, while assuming a range of survival patterns, represented by Weibull survival distributions with constant, increasing and decreasing hazards. Our study showed that the three commonly used methods tended to underestimate the true treatment effect; consequently, the incremental cost‐effectiveness ratio (ICER) would be overestimated. Of the three methods, the least biased is the extended mean survival, which perhaps should be used as the point estimate of the treatment effect to be inputted into the ICER, while the other two approaches could be used in sensitivity analyses. More work on the trade‐offs between simple extrapolation using the exponential distribution and more complicated extrapolation using other methods would be valuable. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.