Balance of care—a user's view of a new approach to joint strategic planning

Planning for care of the Elderly has to face the problems of an increasing elderly population; a wide range of alternative ways of caring for them (at widely differing costs); the fact that services are provided by several different organisations all facing difficult financial constraints; a range of professional opinion about the desirability or otherwise of alternative patterns of care and use of resources; a lack of data on how care is at present distributed; the lack of a structure for organising such data as are available; and the lack of an appropriate computer-based model for manipulating the large number of data elements necessary to describe and help to evaluate alternative plans for the future. The Balance of Care approach to the Joint Strategic Planning of Health and Social Services provision for the Elderly, is being used in pilot applications in two Areas in the UK. Its contribution to the solution of the problems outlined above is described by authors from the two Areas. The approach and the underlying model can be extended to strategic planning for other client groups requiring non-acute care.     

Estimation for High‐Dimensional Linear Mixed‐Effects Models Using ℓ1‐Penalization

Abstract. We propose an ?₁‐penalized estimation procedure for high‐dimensional linear mixed‐effects models. The models are useful whenever there is a grouping structure among high‐dimensional observations, that is, for clustered data. We prove a consistency and an oracle optimality result and we develop an algorithm with provable numerical convergence. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of the method on simulated and a real high‐dimensional data set.     

SERVICES OUTSOURCING AND INNOVATION: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits, and innovation using plant‐level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing, but the magnitude is smaller. We also find that international services outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability, as predicted by theory, whereas this is not true for domestic sourcing. The results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis. (JEL F19, O31)     

Some Bayesian Methods for Two Auditing Problems

Two problems of interest to auditors are: (i) finding an upper bound for the total amount of overstatement of assets in a set of accounts; and (ii) estimating the amount of sales tax owed on a collection of transactions. For the first problem, the Stringer bound has often been used despite the fact that in many cases it is known to be much too large. Here we will introduce a family of stepwise Bayes models that yields bounds that are closely related to the Stringer bound but are less conservative. Then we will show how this approach can also be used for solving the second problem. This will allow practitioners with modest amounts of prior information to select inference procedures with good frequentist properties.