Progressive Corporations at Work: The Case of Diversity Programs

During the civil rights era in the 1960s, the federal government passed a series of measures to end racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. Yet the laws and regulations did not clearly define what constituted illegal discrimination and gave only weak enforcement power to federal agencies. As a result, over the following decades, corporations themselves have defined how they will comply with civil rights law. Human resources managers have created a series of programs designed to improve the status of women and minorities in the workplace, from formalized hiring and promotion procedures to diversity training to mentoring programs. Since firms have made different decisions about which programs to implement, researchers can track firms across time to study the causes and effects of the various programs. In this article, we review many studies, some of which are our own, to find out what factors lead firms to implement anti-discrimination programs and which of these programs are actually successful at increasing workforce and management diversity. We find that regulatory pressure from the federal government has become less influential in driving firms to adopt diversity programs. Instead, advocacy from groups within the firm and industry culture have played greater roles in recent decades. We also find that some of the most popular equal opportunity programs are not actually the most effective. Formalized hiring and promotion procedures, diversity training, and grievance procedures do not lead to improvements in workforce diversity. We argue that these programs are ineffective because they treat managers as the source of the problem. The programs that do lead to results, such as recruitment initiatives and diversity taskforces, are successful because they engage managers in finding solutions. We also conclude that members of historically disadvantaged groups do not benefit from networking programs, but they do benefit from mentoring programs, which link them directly to managers who can help them advance in their careers. Our findings have important public policy implications. Despite progress since the civil rights era, women and minorities are still underrepresented in management-level positions. Therefore, it remains as pressing as ever to understand which programs are effective in promoting workplace equality. The conclusions we present here offer guidance for managers deciding which programs to implement, courts awarding injunctive relief in discrimination suits, and agencies enforcing equal opportunity laws.Sociolog

An Adaptive Dual-level Reinforcement Learning Approach for Optimal Trade Execution

The purpose of this research is to devise a tactic that can closely track the daily cumulative volume-weighted average price (VWAP) using reinforcement learning. Previous studies often choose a relatively short trading horizon to implement their models, making it difficult to accurately track the daily cumulative VWAP since the variations of financial data are often insignificant within the short trading horizon. In this paper, we aim to develop a strategy that can accurately track the daily cumulative VWAP while minimizing the deviation from the VWAP. We propose a method that leverages the U-shaped pattern of intraday stock trade volumes and use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as the learning algorithm. Our method follows a dual-level approach: a Transformer model that captures the overall(global) distribution of daily volumes in a U-shape, and a LSTM model that handles the distribution of orders within smaller(local) time intervals. The results from our experiments suggest that this dual-level architecture improves the accuracy of approximating the cumulative VWAP, when compared to previous reinforcement learning-based models.Comment: Submitted to Expert Systems with Applications (Under 2nd review

Physics-Informed Convolutional Transformer for Predicting Volatility Surface

Predicting volatility is important for asset predicting, option pricing and hedging strategies because it cannot be directly observed in the financial market. The Black-Scholes option pricing model is one of the most widely used models by market participants. Notwithstanding, the Black-Scholes model is based on heavily criticized theoretical premises, one of which is the constant volatility assumption. The dynamics of the volatility surface is difficult to estimate. In this paper, we establish a novel architecture based on physics-informed neural networks and convolutional transformers. The performance of the new architecture is directly compared to other well-known deep-learning architectures, such as standard physics-informed neural networks, convolutional long-short term memory (ConvLSTM), and self-attention ConvLSTM. Numerical evidence indicates that the proposed physics-informed convolutional transformer network achieves a superior performance than other methods.Comment: Submitted to Quantitative Financ

Association between the National Health Insurance coverage benefit extension policy and clinical outcomes of ventilated patients: a retrospective study

Background This study aimed to investigate the association between the Korean National Health Insurance coverage benefit extension policy and clinical outcomes of patients who were ventilated owing to various respiratory diseases. Methods Data from 515 patients (male, 69.7%; mean age, 69.8±12.1 years; in-hospital mortality rate, 28.3%) who were hospitalized in a respiratory intensive care unit were retrospectively analyzed over 5 years. Results Of total enrolled patients, 356 (69.1%) had one benefit items under this policy during their hospital stay. They had significantly higher medical expenditure (total: median, 23,683 vs. 12,742 U.S. dollars [USD], P<0.001), out-of-pocket (median, 5,932 vs. 4,081 USD; P<0.001), and a lower percentage of out-of-pocket medical expenditure relative to total medical expenditure (median, 26.0% vs. 32.2%; P<0.001). Patients without benefit items associated with higher in-hospital mortality (hazard ratio [HR], 2.794; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.980–3.941; P<0.001). In analysis of patients with benefit items, patients with three items (“cancer,” “tuberculosis,” and “disability”) had significantly lower out-of-pocket medical expenditure (3,441 vs. 6,517 USD, P<0.001), and a lower percentage of out-of-pocket medical expenditure relative to total medical expenditure (17.2% vs. 27.7%, P<0.001). They were associated with higher in-hospital mortality (HR, 3.904; 95% CI, 2.533–6.039; P<0.001). Conclusions Our study showed patients with benefit items had more medical resources and associated improved in-hospital survival. Patients with the aforementioned three benefit items had lower out-of-pocket medical expenditure due to the implementation of this policy, but higher in-hospital mortality

Association between Participation in a Rehabilitation Program and 1-Year Survival in Patients Requiring Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation

Background The present study evaluated the association between participation in a rehabilitation program during a hospital stay and 1-year survival of patients requiring at least 21 days of mechanical ventilation (prolonged mechanical ventilation [PMV]) with various respiratory diseases as their main diagnoses that led to mechanical ventilation. Methods Retrospective data of 105 patients (71.4% male, mean age 70.1±11.3 years) who received PMV in the past 5 years were analyzed. Rehabilitation included physiotherapy, physical rehabilitation, and dysphagia treatment program that was individually provided by physiatrists. Results The main diagnosis leading to mechanical ventilation was pneumonia (n=101, 96.2%) and the 1-year survival rate was 33.3% (n=35). One-year survivors had lower Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE) II score (20.2±5.8 vs. 24.2±7.5, p=0.006) and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score (6.7±5.6 vs. 8.5±2.7, p=0.001) on the day of intubation than non-survivors. More survivors participated in a rehabilitation program during their hospital stays (88.6% vs. 57.1%, p=0.001). The rehabilitation program was an independent factor for 1-year survival based on the Cox proportional hazard model (hazard ratio, 3.513; 95% confidence interval, 1.785 to 6.930; p<0.001) in patients with APACHE II scores ≤23 (a cutoff value based on Youden’s index). Conclusion Our study showed that participation in a rehabilitation program during hospital stay was associated with an improvement of 1-year survival of PMV patients who had less severe illness on the day of intubation

You Can't Always Get What You Need: Organizational Determinants of Diversity Programs

While some U.S. corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs, many have done little or nothing. We explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years. Institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation reinforces internal advocacy. We argue that external pressure and internal advocacy serve as alternatives, such that when external pressure is already high, increases in internal advocacy will not alter the likelihood of program adoption. Moreover, institutional theory points to functional need as a driver of innovation. We argue that in the case of innovations designed to achieve new societal goals, functional need, as defined in this case by the absence of workforce diversity or the presence of regulatory oversight, is less important than corporate culture. Our findings help explain the spotty coverage of diversity programs. Firms that lack workforce diversity are no more likely than others to adopt programs, but firms with large contingents of women managers are more likely to do so. Pro-diversity industry and corporate cultures promote diversity programs. The findings carry implications for public policy.Sociolog

Hiding in the Crowd: Ransomware Protection by Adopting Camouflage and Hiding Strategy With the Link File

Ransomware is a growing threat and is building ecosystems in the form of ransomware as a service (RaaS). While there have been diverse efforts to detect and mitigate such threats, techniques to bypass such countermeasures have advanced considerably. Since detecting all evolving threats has become challenging, there is a growing interest in developing proactive countermeasures that can minimize the damage even in environments where ransomware has already been executed. In this study, we gained insights from an attacker&#x2019;s perspective by analyzing ransomware such as LockBit and derived a generic counterstrategy against features that are common in ransomware attacks. Our proposed method protects critical files from existing ransomware by applying a hiding strategy that poses a challenge to attackers in finding the target files. We also present best practices for implementing the strategy while considering both in terms of security and usability using the link file and improving the method through the addition of a linker and encrypted database to reduce the attack surface. By using real-world ransomware samples, our experiments show that the proposed method successfully protects valuable files against ransomware in a cost-effective manner

Virtual Reality Distraction during Endoscopic Urologic Surgery under Spinal Anesthesia: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Sedation protocols during spinal anesthesia often involve sedative drugs associated with complications. We investigated whether virtual reality (VR) distraction could be applied during endoscopic urologic surgery under spinal anesthesia and yield better satisfaction than pharmacologic sedation. VR distraction without sedative was compared with pharmacologic sedation using repeat doses of midazolam 1&#8315;2 mg every 30 min during urologic surgery under spinal anesthesia. We compared the satisfaction of patients, surgeons, and anesthesiologists, as rated on a 5-point prespecified verbal rating scale. Two surgeons and two anesthesiologists rated the scale and an overall score was reported after discussion. Thirty-seven patients were randomized to a VR group (n = 18) or a sedation group (n = 19). The anesthesiologist&#8217;s satisfaction score was significantly higher in the VR group than in the sedation group (median (interquartile range) 5 (5&#8315;5) vs. 4 (4&#8315;5), p = 0.005). The likelihood of both patients and anesthesiologists being extremely satisfied was significantly higher in the VR group than in the sedation group. Agreement between the scores for surgeons and those for anesthesiologists was very good (kappa = 0.874 and 0.944, respectively). The incidence of apnea was significantly lower in the VR group than in the sedation group (n = 1, 5.6% vs. n = 7, 36.8%, p = 0.042). The present findings suggest that VR distraction is better than drug sedation with midazolam in terms of patient&#8217;s and anesthesiologist&#8217;s satisfaction and avoiding the respiratory side effects of midazolam during endoscopic urologic surgery under spinal anesthesia