Natural direct and indirect effects on the exposed : effect decomposition under weaker assumptions

We define natural direct and indirect effects on the exposed. We show that these allow for effect decomposition under weaker identification conditions than population natural direct and indirect effects. When no confounders of the mediator-outcome association are affected by the exposure, identification is possible under essentially the same conditions as for controlled direct effects. Otherwise, identification is still possible with additional knowledge on a nonidentifiable selection-bias function which measures the dependence of the mediator effect on the observed exposure within confounder levels, and which evaluates to zero in a large class of realistic data-generating mechanisms. We argue that natural direct and indirect effects on the exposed are of intrinsic interest in various applications. We moreover show that they coincide with the corresponding population natural direct and indirect effects when the exposure is randomly assigned. In such settings, our results are thus also of relevance for assessing population natural direct and indirect effects in the presence of exposure-induced mediator-outcome confounding, which existing methodology has not been able to address

Distributional Considerations in the Overregulation of Health Professionals, Health Facilities, and Health Plans

Conover addresses the equity issue in health care spending. Conover concludes that the marginal impact of health regulation is to make the US health system more, rather than less, regressive

The political economy of Baltic States’ accession into the EU: The impact on the role of the state. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 5 No. 21, July 2005

[From the introduction]. This paper aims at providing a broad analysis of the EU’s impact on the CEECs which is not sector or policy specific by focusing on the changing role of the state in these countries as a result of direct and indirect impact of the EU. It draws on the concepts developed by the Europeanization studies, debates on the regulation in EU and in particular studies of transition reforms. The studies of the two processes of transition and EU accession, in particular the character and outcomes of their interaction, have for a long time been fragmented and divided into two separate fields. Some analysts go as far as to claim that, “the two not only pass each other as ships in the night, but rarely even sail in the same sea.” (6) This paper starts with the premise that integrating the results of studies from the transition reforms and EU accession policies can provide new insights about the changing role of the state, boundaries between private and public, and potential implications for the success of public policies in the CEECs and growth of their economies. In addition, the paper also critically examines the prevailing arguments concerning the character of EU’s impact on CEECs and provides a different perspective on the issue. Although the literature on the impact of the EU on the redrawing of boundaries between market and the state so far has been rather limited, there have been several arguments which are made explicitly by the authors or are tacitly accepted as the conventional wisdom in policy specific analysis

China Employment Law Update - August 2014

China_Employment_Law_Update_August_2014.pdf: 79 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Health Care Cost Containment and Coverage Expansion

Examines the relationship between expanding insurance coverage and controlling medical costs. Analyzes combinations of cost containment options and coverage expansion models for their compatibility and implications for the feasibility of proposed reforms

Noisy-parallel and comparable corpora filtering methodology for the extraction of bi-lingual equivalent data at sentence level

Text alignment and text quality are critical to the accuracy of Machine Translation (MT) systems, some NLP tools, and any other text processing tasks requiring bilingual data. This research proposes a language independent bi-sentence filtering approach based on Polish (not a position-sensitive language) to English experiments. This cleaning approach was developed on the TED Talks corpus and also initially tested on the Wikipedia comparable corpus, but it can be used for any text domain or language pair. The proposed approach implements various heuristics for sentence comparison. Some of them leverage synonyms and semantic and structural analysis of text as additional information. Minimization of data loss was ensured. An improvement in MT system score with text processed using the tool is discussed.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1509.09093, arXiv:1509.0888

The Impact of Information Technology in Trade Facilitation on Small and Medium Enterprises in the Philippines

The paper is focusing on electronic lodgment through web-based applications of value-added service providers as the IT-based trade facilitation measure, the survey of Customs Brokers conducted in this study revealed that lodgment time in the Philippines dropped to one hour or less as a result, compared to previous lodgment times of one and a half to one day.Information Techonology, Trade Facilitation, SME, Philippines

Abstracts : policy research working paper series - numbers 2568-2618

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 2568-2618.Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Governance Indicators,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

The Reflexive Properties of Corporate Governance Codes: The Reception of the 'Comply or Explain' Approach in Slovenia

The Slovenian Corporate Governance Code for Public Joint-Stock Companies was adopted in March 2004. Using a systems-theoretical approach, we examine the extent to which the implementation of the Code has resulted in the kinds of 'reflexive' learning processes which the 'comply or explain' approach aims to bring about. The adoption of the Code has already had an impact on the wider legal system, triggering certain changes in the body of core company law, and assisting the process of adjustment to EU-level norms. On the whole, companies' implementation strategies are strikingly similar both in terms of the contents of deviations as well as in the type of disclosure and explanations for deviations. At the same time, the quality of disclosures is low, with effective comply-or-explain declarations representing only a small minority of disclosures. On this basis, the Code has been more effective, to date, in legitimating Slovenia's adjustment to transnational norms and standards, than in stimulating institutional learning.corporate governance, comply or explain, disclosure, reflexive law, EU law, transplants, Slovenia