Regulatory Exploitation and the Market for Corporate Controls

This paper investigates whether managers who fail to exploit regulatory loopholes are vulnerable to replacement. We use the U.S. hospital industry in 1985-1996 as a case study. A 1988 change in Medicare rules widened a pre-existing loophole in the Medicare payment system, presenting hospitals with an opportunity to increase operating margins by five or more percentage points simply by “upcoding” patients to more lucrative codes. We find that “room to upcode” is a statistically and economically significant predictor of whether a hospital replaces its management with a new team of for-profit managers. We also find that hospitals replacing their management subsequently upcode more than a sample of similar hospitals that did not, as identified by propensity scores.

Economics of the new member states: A post-crisis perspective

This essay addresses four major issues confronting the Central and Eastern European new members of the European Union in the decade to come. First: what to think of the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. Second, what have they learned from the tremors, having shaken the previous star performers of the EU? Third we ask if we can expect a return to ‘normalcy' as forecast by most models of financial rating agencies and international financial institutions? Fourth the question is raised what did the new members benefit from their EU membership? Some conclusions on the future of EU reforms and policies close the overview

Outsourcing and Offshoring: Pushing the European Model Over the Hill, Rather Than Off the Cliff!

Offshoring and offshore outsourcing is increasingly affecting the EU-15, both in the manufacturing and services sectors. While no official statistics exist for the scope of the phenomenon, industry experts and press surveys point to a relatively limited extent of perhaps up to 2 percent of the workforce as affected. Offshoring and offshore outsourcing, similar to other trade, creates both domestic winners and losers. The EU-15 countries have the potential to become net beneficiaries from offshoring and offshore outsourcing, if they go ahead and implement the EU Lisbon Agenda with respect to labor market reforms and worker-skill upgrading. Furthermore, EU governments should take steps to promote the mobility of the workforce by increasingly linking social benefits to the willingness to move for work, thereby combating their archipelago of high unemployment enclaves, and to reform EU regional aid by shifting it from infrastructure spending to human capital investment.Offshoring, Outsourcing, Multinational Companies, European Union, Public Regulation, Labor Markets, Regional Aid

Creatively Financed Legal Education In A Marketized Environment: How Faculty Leveraged Buyouts Can Maximize Law Schools’ Stakeholder Values

“This [financial aid] money is not necessarily going to educate more students or to improve education. It’s a scholarship ultimately going into profits.”

Data Leak Detection As a Service: Challenges and Solutions

We describe a network-based data-leak detection (DLD) technique, the main feature of which is that the detection does not require the data owner to reveal the content of the sensitive data. Instead, only a small amount of specialized digests are needed. Our technique – referred to as the fuzzy fingerprint – can be used to detect accidental data leaks due to human errors or application flaws. The privacy-preserving feature of our algorithms minimizes the exposure of sensitive data and enables the data owner to safely delegate the detection to others.We describe how cloud providers can offer their customers data-leak detection as an add-on service with strong privacy guarantees. We perform extensive experimental evaluation on the privacy, efficiency, accuracy and noise tolerance of our techniques. Our evaluation results under various data-leak scenarios and setups show that our method can support accurate detection with very small number of false alarms, even when the presentation of the data has been transformed. It also indicates that the detection accuracy does not degrade when partial digests are used. We further provide a quantifiable method to measure the privacy guarantee offered by our fuzzy fingerprint framework

Surprise! Out-of-network billing for emergency care in the United States

Using insurance claims data capturing 8.9 million emergency episodes, we show that in 22% of cases, patients attended in-network hospitals, but were treated by out-of-network physicians. We find that out-of-network billing is concentrated in a small group of primarily for-profit hospitals. Within 50% of hospitals in our sample, fewer than 5% of patients saw out-of-network physicians. In contrast, at 15% of hospitals, more than 80% of patients saw out-of-network physicians. Out-of-network billing allows physicians to substantially increase their payment rates relative to what they would be paid for treating in-network patients and significantly improve their outside option when bargaining over in-network payments. Because patients cannot avoid out-of-network physicians during an emergency, physicians have an incentive to remain out-of-network and receive higher payment rates. Hospitals incur costs when out-of-network billing occurs within their facilities. We illustrate in a model and confirm empirically via analysis of two leading physician-outsourcing firms that physicians offer transfers to hospitals to offset the hospitals’ costs of allowing out-of-network billing to occur within their facilities. We find that a New York State law that introduced binding arbitration between physicians and insurers to settle surprise bills reduced out-of-network billing rates

Rumours of the Death of the American Public Company are Greatly Exaggerated

The public company has historically been a crucial element of the American economy. Various predictions have been made recently that the public company’s future is bleak. This essay maintains these gloomy conjectures are erroneous. Companies leave the stock market by way of public-to-private buyouts with some regularity but large firms are rarely affected. Prosperous start-up companies are delaying joining the stock market but nevertheless usually end up in the public domain. There are considerably fewer public companies now than there were twenty years ago. Based, however, on the ratio of aggregate market capitalization to gross domestic product, the public company is currently as important relative to the U.S. economy as it ever have been, if not more so.Major Research Fellowship, Leverhulme Trus