Are Mandates the Answer? Improving Palliative Care and Pain Management in Vermont

Background: The Vermont legislature (bill H.435, Sec. 19) has tasked the Vermont Board of Medical Practice (VBMP) with making a formal recommendation on improving Vermont health professionals’ knowledge and practice of Palliative Care and Pain Management (PC/PM). In collaboration with the VBMP, our group set out to answer the following questions: • How confident/competent are VT physicians in the practice of PC/PM? • What are the barriers to achieving optimal patient care in PC/PM? • Do VT physicians believe mandatory CME would improve the overall quality of care in PC/PM? • What are the best methods of providing Continuing Medical Education (CME)?https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1040/thumbnail.jp

Evidence and Ideology in Macroeconomics: The Case of Investment Cycles

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic movements can be represented as low order, stochastic, dynamic processes with complex eigenvalues. Specifically, there is a fixed investment cycle of about 8 years and an inventory cycle of about 4 years. Maximum entropy spectral analysis was employed for the description of the cycles and continuous time econometrics for the explanatory models. The central explanatory mechanism is the second order accelerator, which incorporates adjustment costs both in relation to the capital stock and the rate of investment. By means of parametric resonance it was possible to show, both theoretically and empirically how cycles aggregate from the micro to the macro level. The same mathematical tool was also used to explain the international convergence of cycles. I argue that the theory of investment cycles was abandoned for ideological, not for evidential reasons. Methodological issues are also discussed

Input and Output Inventories in General Equilibrium

We build and estimate a two‐sector (goods and services) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two types of inventories: materials (input) inventories facilitate the production of finished goods, while finished goods (output) inventories yield utility services. The model is estimated using Bayesian methods. The estimated model replicates the volatility and cyclicality of inventory investment and inventory‐to‐target ratios. Although inventories are an important element of the model’s propagation mechanism, shocks to inventory efficiency or management are not an important source of business cycles. When the model is estimated over two subperiods (pre ‐ and post‐1984), changes in the volatility of inventory shocks, or in structural parameters associated with inventories play a minor role in reducing the volatility of output