Transparency and Public Reporting Are Essential for a Safe Health Care System

Compares three approaches to spurring hospitals to improve patient safety and argues that public reporting of performance and feedback to providers is more effective than regulation and accreditation or financial incentives

Asset Accumulation, Information, and the Life Cycle

Empirical tests of the life cycle model have focused on its implications for the level of a household's total net worth and paid little attention to changes in portfolio composition over the life cycle. In this paper, we examine a new survey of the asset holdings of 6,010 U.S households and show that there is a pronounced life-cycle pattern to both the number and value of assets held by U.S. households. Direct survey evidence suggests that incomplete information is a significant determinant of household portfolio composition. We test the hypothesis that information about investment opportunities arrives stochastically over time, estimating a Poisson model for the arrival of new information.

Wealth and Portfolio Composition: Theory and Evidence

In this paper, we examine a new survey of 6,010 U.S.households and estimate a model for the allocation of total net worth among different assets. The paper has three main aims. The first is to investigate the extent to which a conventional portfolio choice model can explain the differences in portfolio composition among households. Our survey data show that most households hold only a subset of the available assets. Hence we analyze a model in which investors choose to hold incomplete portfolios. We show that the empirical specification of the joint discrete and continuous choice that characterizes household portfolio behavior is a switching regressions model with endogenous switching. The second aim is to examine the impact of taxes on portfolio composition. The survey contains a great deal of information on taxable incomes and deductions which enable us to calculate rather precisely the marginal tax rate facing each household.The third aim is to estimate wealth elasticities of demand for a range of assets and liabilities. We test the frequently made assumption of constant relative risk aversion.

Zero-draft proposal on sustainable development goals falls short

In November 2014, the IGC, along with 18 world-leading economists, sent an open letter to the Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations urging the UN to champion economic growth as the driving force in achieving meaningful and sustained poverty reduction. The newly published ‘Zero-draft’ of the Sustainable Development Goals has fallen disappointingly short of the recommendations put forth in our letter

IGC COVID-19 guidance note: containment strategies and support for vulnerable households

Policymakers across the developing world are facing the need to make rapid decisions on their COVID-19 response with little available data or guidance. IGC is working to support these decision-making processes by increasing the supply of data and distilling relevant policy guidance. We are launching a large collaborative data collection effort to provide policymakers with access to the best available data on the spread of the virus and its evolving economic impact so that the policy responses can be tailored to the local context and capacity and adjusted in real time. We are also drawing on the expertise of researchers in economics, development and health to set out provisional guidance based on the limited evidence available so far. This policy guidance reflects our current thinking. It is a living document that will be updated as new evidence becomes available

An exploratory field study of the effects of racial-activist training on the attitudes and behavior of concerned citizens in the community

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, Speech and Drama, 1973

Making Healthcare Safe

This unique and engaging open access title provides a compelling and ground-breaking account of the patient safety movement in the United States, told from the perspective of one of its most prominent leaders, and arguably the movement’s founder, Lucian L. Leape, MD. Covering the growth of the field from the late 1980s to 2015, Dr. Leape details the developments, actors, organizations, research, and policy-making activities that marked the evolution and major advances of patient safety in this time span. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, this book not only comprehensively details how and why human and systems errors too often occur in the process of providing health care, it also promotes an in-depth understanding of the principles and practices of patient safety, including how they were influenced by today’s modern safety sciences and systems theory and design. Indeed, the book emphasizes how the growing awareness of systems-design thinking and the self-education and commitment to improving patient safety, by not only Dr. Leape but a wide range of other clinicians and health executives from both the private and public sectors, all converged to drive forward the patient safety movement in the US. Making Healthcare Safe is divided into four parts: I. In the Beginning describes the research and theory that defined patient safety and the early initiatives to enhance it. II. Institutional Responses tells the stories of the efforts of the major organizations that began to apply the new concepts and make patient safety a reality. Most of these stories have not been previously told, so this account becomes their histories as well. III. Getting to Work provides in-depth analyses of four key issues that cut across disciplinary lines impacting patient safety which required special attention. IV. Creating a Culture of Safety looks to the future, marshalling the best thinking about what it will take to achieve the safe care we all deserve. Captivatingly written with an “insider’s” tone and a major contribution to the clinical literature, this title will be of immense value to health care professionals, to students in a range of academic disciplines, to medical trainees, to health administrators, to policymakers and even to lay readers with an interest in patient safety and in the critical quest to create safe care

Myelopathy Caused by Spinal Dural Arterio-Venous Fistula after First Lumbar Vertebral Body Fracture - A Case Report -

Spinal dural arteriovenous fistula is a rare vascular lesion of the spinal cord associated with progressive myelopathy. Symptoms include progressive gait dysfunction, weakness, sensory loss, and bowel and bladder dysfunction. Because these symptoms overlap with other common causes of myelopathy and the disease is rare, spinal dural arteriovenous fistula is often not suspected and the time to diagnosis is long. We report the case of a 60-year-old woman who presented with progressive lower limb weakness and gait disturbance diagnosed as spinal dural arteriovenous fistula involving a fractured L1 vertebral body