Patient Autonomy in Talmudic Context: The Patient’s ‘‘I Must Eat’’ on Yom Kippur in the Light of Contemporary Bioethics

In contemporary bioethics, the autonomy of the patient has assumed considerable importance. Progressing from a more limited notion of informed consent, shared decision making calls upon patients to voice the desires and preferences of their authentic self, engaging in choice among alternatives as a way to exercise deeply held values. One influential opinion in Jewish bioethics holds that Jewish law, in contradistinction to secular bioethics, limits the patient's exercise of autonomy only in those instances in which treatment choices are sensitive to preferences. Here, we analyze a discussion in the Mishna, a foundational text of rabbinic Judaism, regarding patient autonomy in the setting of religiously mandated fasting, and commentaries in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, finding both a more expansive notion of such autonomy and a potential metaphysical grounding for it in the importance of patient self-knowledge

The Democratic-Republican Presidential Growth Gap and the Partisan Balance of the State Governments

Higher economic growth was generated during Democratic presidencies compared to Republican presidencies in the United States. The question is why. Blinder and Watson (2016) explain that the Democratic-Republican presidential growth gap (D-R growth gap) can hardly be attributed to the policies under Democratic presidents, but Democratic presidents – at least partly – just had good luck, although a substantial gap remains unexplained. A natural place to look for an explanation is the partisan balance at the state level. We show that pronounced national GDP growth was generated when a larger share of US states had Democratic governors and unified Democratic state governments. However, this fact does not explain the D-R growth gap. To the contrary, given the tendency of electoral support at the state level to swing away from the party of the incumbent president, this works against the D-R growth gap. In fact, the D-R presidential growth gap at the national level might have been even larger were it not for the mitigating dynamics of state politics (by about 0.3-0.6 percentage points). These results suggest that the D-R growth gap is an even bigger puzzle than Blinder and Watson’s findings would suggest

The economic determinants of compensation committee quality

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic determinants of compensation committee quality. Design/methodology/approach - Sample firms were selected from the IRRC Directors\u27 database. Compensation committee quality is measured as the factor score from a principal component analysis of six compensation committee characteristics. Regression analyses are conducted to test the hypotheses. Findings - It was found that firms with lower CEO influence, less institutional shareholders, fewer growth opportunities, and that are smaller in size are more likely to have high quality compensation committees. Practical implications - The results imply that even in the presence of a requirement to have only independent directors on the compensation committee, the quality of compensation committees can vary cross-sectionally depending on the firm\u27s economic circumstances. Thus, a one-size fits all solution for compensation committee quality might not be optimal as different firms have different incentives in composing their compensation committees. Originality/value - This paper adds to the limited literature on compensation committees by using a new measure of compensation committee quality to examine the economic factors that affect the governance quality of independent compensation committees. This paper also complements the board and audit committee research by examining whether the same factors that affect board and audit committee quality might also affect compensation committee quality

The Effect of Compensation Committee Quality on the Association between CEO Cash Compensation and Accounting Performance

We examine the effect of compensation committee quality on the association between CEO cash compensation and accounting earnings and the moderating effects of growth opportunities and earnings status. Research Findings/Insights: Using a sample of 812 US firms, we find that CEO cash compensation is more positively associated with accounting earnings when firms have high compensation committee quality. We also find that the positive effect of compensation committee quality on the association between CEO cash compensation and accounting earnings is less for high growth firms or loss-making firms.Theoretical Implications: We contribute to the agency-based research on CEO compensation by: 1) directly examining the impact of compensation committee quality on the sensitivity of CEO cash compensation to accounting earnings; 2) examining whether the role of compensation committee quality varies across firms; and 3) developing a broader and richer measure of compensation committee quality. Practical Implications: Our findings imply that shareholders and directors should be concerned about the composition of compensation committees as we find that compensation committee quality varies depending on compensation committee size and other characteristics of the committee members. Our findings also imply that for compensation committee members, there are greater challenges in monitoring CEO compensation contracts for firms with high growth or that incur losses. Further, our findings imply that even when all compensation committees are regulated to be fully independent, there are still quality differences among these independent compensation committees

Division of labor and the evolution of task sharing in queen associations of the harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus

Division of labor is a key factor in the ecological success of social groups. Recent work suggests that division of labor can emerge even without specific adaptations for task specialization and that it can appear in incipient social groups as a self-organizational property. We investigated experimentally how selection and self-organization may interact during the evolution of division of labor by examining task performance in groups of normally solitary versus normally social ant queens. We created social pairs of colony-founding queens from two populations of the ant Pogonomyrmex californicus, one in which queens are normally solitary and one in which queens form foundress groups, and observed their behavior during nest excavation. In both populations, one of the two queens usually performed most of the excavation, becoming the excavation specialist. We could predict which queen would become the specialist based on their relative propensities to perform the task in other contexts, consistent with a variance-based model of task specialization. The occurrence of specialization even when group members were not adapted to social life suggests that division of labor may well have been present in incipient queen groups. However, division of labor can result in cost skew among group members, and thus, paradoxically, within-group selection may constrain or even reduce specialization. Consistent with this effect, pairs of normally solitary queens were significantly more asymmetrical in their task performance than normally social pairs, in which both queens nearly always performed the behavior to some degre

Some firms actively use CSR to improve their image in the public media

A good image brings financial rewards, write Steven Cahan, Chen Chen, Lily Chen and Nick (Nhut H. Nguyen