... 2002. The authors, all of whom are physician staff for the American Red Cross, have made every attempt to fairly reproduce the advice and lessons ...
Story - wulan - 08/07/2009 - 03:32 - 0 comments - 0 attachments
We review recent literature on the role of financial reporting in resolving agency conflicts in corporate governance and debt contracting settings. We define corporate governance and debt contracting in a broad sense to encompass the complex set of formal and informal agreements among shareholders, managers, boards and creditors. Similarly, we define financial reporting quite broadly to include all of the information in firms financial reports that influences transparency in the information environment that encompasses the contracting parties.
A key theme of our review is the notion that a firm's contractual arrangements and its corporate information environment evolve together over time to resolve agency conflicts. That is, certain contractual arrangements work more efficiently with certain information and financial reporting choices. As a result, one does not necessarily expect to observe firms converging to a single dominant type of corporate governance structure, compensation contract, debt contract, or financial reporting system, but rather one expects to observe heterogeneity in these mechanisms that is a function of firms economic characteristics. Although this notion appears to be more widely accepted in the literature on debt contracts, the governance literature seems more burdened by the idea that some governance structures are unconditionally “good” or “bad”.
Poor pain management in surgical settings is known to be associated with slower recovery, greater morbidity, longer lengths of stay, lower patient satisfaction, and higher costs of care, suggesting that optimal pain care in these settings is of utmost importance in promoting acute illness management, recovery, and adaptation. VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guidelines have been developed for the management of acute post-operative pain, although the basis for many of the recommendations was by expert consensus rather than empirical evidence.
The prevalence of pain on the inpatient medical ward is lower than that of a surgical service, but is still substantial. In one hospital survey, 43% of medical ward patients experienced pain, and 12% reported unbearable pain. There are currently no pain-relevant performance measures in place that can support efforts to enhance pain care in these settings, and research on pain management in nonsurgical, nonmalignant acute pain is sparse.
A common feature in many trade-policy applications is the Armington (1969) assumption of national product differentiation. Brown (1987) critiques these applications, questioning the validity of simulated liberalizations that result in very large adverse terms-of-trade effects for relatively small countries. We expand this critique by noting that at the calibration stage of formulating most Armington models sub-national (firm-level) product differentiation is not considered. The resulting marginal-cost pricing at the sub-national level implicitly allocates market power over unique varieties away from optimizing firms and toward the whim of the policy authority. Although pervasive in applications, this allocation of market power to countries rather than firms is a troubling departure from traditional tenets.
This study contributes to the policy simulation literature in two important ways. First, we use a generalized model of nested differentiation to illustrate the mutual consistency between traditional models of national differentiation and the large-group monopolistic competition models popular in new trade theory. Second, we identify a tension in calibration assumptions between firm-level market power and national-level international-policy lever age. Market power is conceptually observable, and is show to be an important consideration in applied welfare analysis. Assuming optimal firm-level pricing over a country’s varieties can significantly reduce the implied optimal tariff.
