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Through its effect on the cost of capital, impact investing has the potential to improve the pricing of externalities, reducing the current overproduction and consumption of goods with negative social and environmental impacts and stimulating production and consumption of goods with positive social and environmental impacts. For this potential to be realised, the design of impact investing needs to be better aligned with portfolio management in two respects: (1) it needs to be possible to assess the impact of both asset classes and individual assets and (2) the analysis of the characteristics of assets needs to be separated from the use of mandate-related screens.

Ten years after the first comprehensive review of fiscal noting in the states, revisiting the impact of cost analysis on unfunded state mandates yields pessimistic conclusions. More states have adopted fiscal noting over the period, yet few report that the process is successful. The majority of fiscal notes contain no cost estimates at all for a variety of reasons, including lack of time, lack of resources, lack of legislative attention, and perhaps lack of institutional capacity.

As of 2011, the average US state had 37 health insurance benefit mandates, laws requiring health insurance plans to cover a specific treatment, condition, provider, or person. This number is a massive increase from less than one mandate per state in 1965, and the topic takes on a new significance now, when the federal government is considering many new mandates as part of the “essential health benefits” required by the Affordable Care Act. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors use fixed effects estimation on 1996-2010 data to determine why some states pass more mandates than others.

The authors find that the political strength of health care providers is the strongest determinant of mandates.

A large body of literature has attempted to evaluate the effect of mandates on health, health insurance, and the labor market. However, previous papers did not consider the political processes behind the passage of mandates. In fact, when they estimate the laws’ effect, almost all papers on the subject assume that mandates are passed at random. The paper opens the way to estimating the causal effect of mandates on health insurance and the labor market using an instrumental variables strategy that incorporates political information about why mandates get passed.

Objectivism is the critical lens used to view organizational communication of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Government Performance Results Modernization Act of 2010 changed requirements for such communication by mandating that agencies like DHS emphasize performance goals and targets to be achieved in the upcoming years in their performance reporting. Interpretivism is the sense-making lens used to view changes in performance reporting. This study focuses on performance target reductions, new performance measures, and retired performance measures documented in a DHS annual report. Nineteen performance measures were selected and discussed from empirical interpretivist and institutional interpretivist lenses. When intepretivism cannot match what is reported with what would appear to be logical, administrative ironies are established.

Every employer, unless he or she has no pool of applicants or potential applicants to choose from, engages in hiring choices. While the hiring process may vary, both from one employer to another and from one job to another, some form of screening occurs. In recent years, students of management have noted the proliferation of screening practices in the hiring process, especially in bringing new technologies such as medical and drug testing procedures. Testing and other screening practices, while wide‐ranging both with respect to their ends and means, have raised consistent patterns of concern among job‐seekers, public policy makers and managers themselves. In this monograph a variety of methods of screening and issues of public policy raised by screening procedures are discussed. An overview of United States law regulating the screening process is provided, together with future directions in the area of screening in the US.

At the US passenger stations, train operations approaching terminating tracks rely on the engineer’s compliant behavior to safely stop before the end of the tracks. Noncompliance actions from the disengaged or inattentive engineers would result in hazards to train passengers, train crewmembers and bystanders at passenger stations. Over the past decade, a series of end-of-track collisions occurred at passenger stations with substantial property damage and casualties. This study’s developed systemic model and discussions present policymakers, railway practitioners and academic researchers with a flexible approach for qualitatively assessing railroad safety.

To achieve a system-based, micro-level analysis of end-of-track accidents and eventually promote the safety level of passenger stations, the systems-theoretic accident modeling and processes (STAMP), as a practical systematic accident model widely used in the complex systems, is developed in view of environmental factors, human errors, organizational factors and mechanical failures in this complex socio-technical system.

The developed STAMP accident model and analytical results qualitatively provide an explicit understanding of the system hazards, constraints and hierarchical control structure of train operations on terminating tracks in the US passenger stations. Furthermore, the safety recommendations and practical options related to obstructive sleep apnea screening, positive train control-based collision avoidance mechanisms, robust system safety program plans and bumping posts are proposed and evaluated using the STAMP approach.

The findings from STAMP-based analysis can serve as valid references for policymakers, government accident investigators, railway practitioners and academic researchers. Ultimately, they can contribute to establishing effective emergent measures for train operations at passenger stations and promote the level of safety necessary to protect the public. The STAMP approach could be adapted to analyze various other rail safety systems that aim to ultimately improve the safety level of railroad systems.

Andrew Williams and I have argued since the early 1990s that not only have equity (and subsequently most other assets classes) come to be dominated by institutional ownership of various types, an observation that many have made and documented at length, but that the majority of those institutions are fiduciary ones (primarily pension and mutual funds in the United States). More recently pension and mutual funds have been the source of the majority of funds for many ‘alternative’ investments, such as hedge funds, private equity and commodity funds. In the last two decades there have been parallel developments in other countries, although the form of the institutional investors vary widely, from fiduciary ones mostly in common law countries to fiduciary-like ones in many civil law jurisdictions (e.g. the Netherlands), to some sovereign wealth funds (e.g. Norway and Australia and some others) which do not have fiduciary obligations as such, but in their legal mandates and practices are structured much like those that are fiduciary or fiduciary like. As discussed below, all these (in addition to some other large institutional owners) are universal owners, that is, they own a representative cross section of their investment universe (which increasingly is a global universe). Given their ownership structure characterised by a large degree of diversification, universal owners' long-term interests to a large degree coincide with the economy as a whole.

The role of the school nurse has evolved. It has expanded from administering first aid and promoting hand washing to key participation in program planning for health and educational outcomes for the school-aged child. Nurses provide leadership in promoting a healthy and safe school environment, case management of chronically ill children, collaboration between family and school, and referral to essential community resources. Additionally, the school nurse is a valuable resource on the multidisciplinary special education team. The school nurse is the health care expert in the school and is in a unique position to meet the actual and potential needs of all students – including those with special needs.

Hearing loss impacts language and communication, a building block for relationships and society. Most teachers and professionals rarely have a young child with hearing loss in their classroom. The “unknown” can be a source of stress for the professionals and the families alike. Understanding the characteristics of this population of students, the diagnostic process, the possible early intervention supports, and practices to use with young children with hearing loss may help teachers and professionals approach students and families with more confidence. This chapter will outline each of the aforementioned with an emphasis on understanding parental perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to show that in the presence of the marketing concept something is fundamentally wrong in our national health care system where patients are denied emergency medical treatment or are prematurely transferred from one hospital to another because they cannot guarantee payment.

A viewpoint is discussed citing supporting literature.

The literature suggests an adverse relationship between the marketing concept and the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) and further suggests that the two are failing indigent patients. The marketing concept as a driving business philosophy is too simplistic and commercially oriented to befit an emergency setting. At the same time, EMTALA suffers from serious shortcomings, shackles hospitals' freedom of contract and threatens the economics of health care.

The paper lacks quantitative research to back its position.

It is not enough to coin positively sounding theories within healthcare marketing when these theories are inadequate in addressing the stark realities behind supply and demand. EMTALA as a remedial measure falls short in correcting the situation and a fresh outlook at the problem is warranted.

The paper taps into marketing and legal expertise in bringing together the marketing concept and EMTALA, two subjects that have never been twinned before in the literature. The subjects are of special interest in understanding the treatment of indigent patients.