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Research on hospital productivity has progressed over the last few decades considerably from early models where measurements of hospital services simply counted inpatient days, and perhaps outpatient visits or numbers of surgeries performed. This simplicity represents an extreme of aggregation, focuses the attention of the analysis entirely on the structure of the organization at the highest levels, and provides no insight into the specific services that might be provided to each patient as well as the characteristics of those patients, which might lead to specialization of their care. This process is fundamentally complex, which makes it especially difficult to model. This table-setting chapter will characterize some of the key contextual choices that must be made by researchers in this field which are then applied in subsequent chapters. The key point of this chapter will be to argue that there are very few “one size fits all” decisions in this process and thus the context of particular research objectives and questions will determine how modeling choices are made in practice. Some intuition about how these decisions have substantial implications for outcomes of measurement for hospital productivity will be provided; however, no attempt will be made to conduct a literature review of all the choices that have been made. Instead, we will suggest that new careful attention to the choices made can make future studies more effective in communicating to the communities implementing the research.

This chapter proposes an optimized innovative information technology as a means for achieving operational functionalities of real-time portable electronic health records, system interoperability, longitudinal health-risks research cohort and surveillance of adverse events infrastructure, and clinical, genome regions – disease and interventional prevention infrastructure. In application to the Dod-VA (Department of Defense and Veteran's Administration) health information systems, the proposed modernization can be carried out as an “add-on” expansion (estimated at $288 million in constant dollars) or as a “stand-alone” innovative information technology system (estimated at $489.7 million), and either solution will prototype an infrastructure for nation-wide health information systems interoperability, portable real-time electronic health records (EHRs), adverse events surveillance, and interventional prevention based on targeted single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) discovery.

Numerous scales have been developed and utilized in the tourism and hospitality field, yet, their psychometric properties have not been systematically reviewed and evaluated. This gap compromises researchers' ability to develop better measures and improve measurement decisions. In this current study, 56 scales were identified and evaluated in terms of their psychometric properties. It was found that most scales were imperfect in measuring tourism and hospitality domains, and most scales did not provide explicit information about the scale development procedures that were adopted. The scale development procedure and psychometric properties of the reviewed scales are summarized, evaluated, and recommendations are made for future tourism and hospitality scale development.

This chapter is a contribution to a recent restricted literature dealing with the return of microfinance investment in the financial markets. We study the performance of public microfinance investment vehicles (MIVs). Microfinance is an asset class with a double bottom line: social and financial returns have to be generated. Despite a significant currency risk, we find that the integration of microfinance assets diversifies the investor’s risks and improves the efficient frontier. We conclude that microfinance institutions, via investment vehicles, are likely to attract capital from socially responsible investors seeking new investment opportunities.

Several official institutions (NBER, OECD, CEPR, and others) provide business cycle chronologies with lags ranging from three months to several years. In this paper, we propose a Markov-switching dynamic factor model that allows for a more timely estimation of turning points. We apply one-step and two-step estimation approaches to French data and compare their performance. One-step maximum likelihood estimation is confined to relatively small data sets, whereas two-step approach that uses principal components can accommodate much bigger information sets. We find that both methods give qualitatively similar results and agree with the OECD dating of recessions on a sample of monthly data covering the period 1993–2014. The two-step method is more precise in determining the beginnings and ends of recessions as given by the OECD. Both methods indicate additional downturns in the French economy that were too short to enter the OECD chronology.

This paper examines the nature of regional trade integration between the United States and Canada by using a Similarity Index that summarizes the behavior of exports of states along the U.S./Canadian border relative to U.S. states that are not on the Canadian border. An export Similarity Index is used to show the considerable importance of industry mix relative to distance. Similarity Index changes suggest that increased export sales between the U.S. and Canada between 1996 and 2001 were not primarily driven by proximity factors that underlie a regional phenomenon. Industry factors independent of location and distance were important contributors to changes in U.S. exports to Canada. The upshot is that global, not regional, factors may underlie increasing trade between the U.S. and Canada. That is, an apparent global phenomenon may have been mistaken for a regional one.

This paper examines associations of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICTs) with inequality and poverty. It has been found that newspaper circulation has a robust negative association with inequality. Radios and TVs also have a negative association with poverty. ICT expenditures (as a percentage of GDP) have a negative association with poverty. An ICT index is constructed which also has a negative association with poverty. An instrumental variable analysis confirms the robust negative association between newspaper circulation and inequality.