Client abuse to public welfare workers: theoretical framework and critical incident case study

We analyse a case study of workers’ experience of client abuse in a Danish public welfare organisation. We make an original contribution by putting forward two different theoretical expectations of the case. One expectation is that the case follows a pattern of customer abuse processes in a social market economy – in which worker are accorded power and resources, in which workers tend to frame the abuse as the outcome of a co-citizen caught in system failure, and in which workers demonstrate some resilience to abuse. Another expectation is that New Public Management reforms push the case to follow patterns of customer abuse associated with a liberal market economy – in which the customer is treated as sovereign against the relatively powerless worker, and in which workers bear heavy emotional costs of abuse. Our findings show a greater match to the social processes of abuse within a social market economy

Implied cost of capital investment strategies - evidence from international stock markets

Investors can generate excess returns by implementing trading strategies based on publicly available equity analyst forecasts. This paper captures the information provided by analysts by the implied cost of capital (ICC), the internal rate of return that equates a firm's share price to the present value of analysts' earnings forecasts. We find that U.S. stocks with a high ICC outperform low ICC stocks on average by 6.0% per year. This spread is significant when controlling the investment returns for their risk exposure as proxied by standard pricing models. Further analysis across the world's largest equity markets validates these results

Market Imitation and Win-Stay Lose-Shift Strategies Emerge as Unintended Patterns in Market Direction Guesses.

Decisions made in our everyday lives are based on a wide variety of information so it is generally very difficult to assess what are the strategies that guide us. Stock market provides a rich environment to study how people make decisions since responding to market uncertainty needs a constant update of these strategies. For this purpose, we run a lab-in-the-field experiment where volunteers are given a controlled set of financial information -based on real data from worldwide financial indices- and they are required to guess whether the market price would go "up" or "down" in each situation. From the data collected we explore basic statistical traits, behavioural biases and emerging strategies. In particular, we detect unintended patterns of behavior through consistent actions, which can be interpreted as Market Imitation and Win-Stay Lose-Shift emerging strategies, with Market Imitation being the most dominant. We also observe that these strategies are affected by external factors: the expert advice, the lack of information or an information overload reinforce the use of these intuitive strategies, while the probability to follow them significantly decreases when subjects spends more time to make a decision. The cohort analysis shows that women and children are more prone to use such strategies although their performance is not undermined. Our results are of interest for better handling clients expectations of trading companies, to avoid behavioural anomalies in financial analysts decisions and to improve not only the design of markets but also the trading digital interfaces where information is set down. Strategies and behavioural biases observed can also be translated into new agent based modelling or stochastic price dynamics to better understand financial bubbles or the effects of asymmetric risk perception to price drops

Stock characteristics and herding in financial analyst recommendations

Most studies investigating the herding of financial analysts focused on the impact of analyst attributes on herding, while firm characteristics may also contribute significantly to herding. The primary objective of this study is to examine whether analyst recommendations prefer stocks with firm characteristics associated with future returns and demonstrate the so-called 'characteristic herding' behaviour. Thus, in this study, we incorporate within Welch's (2000) model those characteristics of firms relating to future returns; as a result, we find that 'characteristic herding' is discernible in the recommendations of financial analysts. This tendency towards herding in analyst recommendations increases with the firm size and book-to-price ratio of the stock. One of these two firm characteristics positively correlates with the future returns of stocks while the other displays a negative correlation. Consequently, the 'characteristic herding' of analysts is caused in part by recommendations made on account of stock fundamentals and in part by other reasons. This may dampen the impact of future returns on herding. It has also been observed that herding exists in the market regardless of bull market or bear market. No significant inferiority is reported in analyst performance with herding when compared to the performance without herding.

Visual analog rating of mood by people with aphasia

AbstractBackground:Considerable attention has been given to the identification of depression in stroke survivors with aphasia, but there is more limited information about other mood states. Visual analog scales are often used to collect subjective information from people with aphasia. However, the validity of these methods for communicating about mood has not been established in people with moderately to severely impaired language.Objective:The dual purposes of this study were to characterize the relative endorsement of negative and positive mood states in people with chronic aphasia after stroke and to examine congruent validity for visual analog rating methods for people with a range of aphasia severity.Methods:Twenty-three left-hemisphere stroke survivors with aphasia were asked to indicate their present mood by using two published visual analog rating methods. The congruence between the methods was estimated through correlation analysis, and scores for different moods were compared.Results:Endorsement..