The Regulatory Component of Health Care Reform

Explains the rationales and goals of regulatory intervention. Assesses the likelihood that proposed changes to regulations will be implemented as a component of healthcare reform or that they will help control costs and improve efficiency

URBAN CONCENTRATION: PROSPECTS AND IMPLICATIONS

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

The Economics of Scholarly Publications and the Information Superhighway

This article examines the basic economics of scholarly publications, especially technical journals, and applies this model to the consequences of low-cost electronic publication. The article discusses the demand for scholarly publication: dissemination of new information to students, other researchers and professional users outside the educational community; reputation development by scholars and research institutions; and the evaluation of research personnel by peerds and superiors. The key supply feature of scholarely publication is that some uses are public goods, and others have strong economies of scale. Electronic publication reduces duplication and storage costs, but does not have much of an effect on fixed costs, and so is a minor technological change purely from the perspective of costs. However, electronic publication is a major change in two respects: it radically alters the relative costs of enhancements to straight textual material, and so may change the content of publications, and it dramatically reduces the cost of unauthorized duplication. The article focuses on the latter problem, and explores some of its possible consequences.

The Economic Significance of Executive Order 13422

In January 2007, President Bush issued an Executive Order changing the procedures for undertaking benefit-cost analyses of proposed regulations. These changes have been hailed by some as dramatic improvements while criticized by others as representing the politicization of the evaluation process. This essay analyzes the major provisions of the new Executive Order, and concludes that it is unlikely to have much of an impact on the number or quality of regulations. Only one provision, subjecting major "guidelines" documents to mandatory benefit-cost analysis, potentially could be important, but even here there is no systematic evidence that agencies have used guidance documents to change the stringency of regulations and thereby to bypass the mandatory regulatory review for regulations. Moreover, the Executive Order leaves untouched the primary weaknesses of benefit-cost analysis as practiced by government agencies, such as the absence of standardization of values for key parameters, the use of inappropriate alternative regulations for comparison with a proposed regulation, and the general lack of either peer review or ex post re-evaluation of regulatory impact studies.

Read-React-Respond: An integrative model for understanding sexual revictimization

Females who have been sexually abused in childhood are at significantly higher risk to be revictimized in adolescence and adulthood. Revictimization is associated with a raft of adverse mental and physical health outcomes, and so understanding why victims of childhood sexual abuse are more vulnerable to later sexual assaults has critical implications for their development. It has been hypothesized that sexual abuse in childhood results in reduced ability to recognize and/or respond effectively to sexual threats later in life, but studies examining these ideas have produced inconsistent results. Further, this research has failed to incorporate the powerful physiological reaction elicited by threats of imminent harm to the self, which has the potential to disrupt cognitive processing and coping behavior. In the present paper, we propose a model of revictimization that integrates contemporary theory and research on the biological stress response with cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors believed to be involved in adaptive responding to sexual threats. The model provides a conceptual guide for understanding why females with a history of sexual abuse are more vulnerable to revictimization and offers ideas for improving prevention programs designed to strengthen females’ ability to resist sexual coercion