An Analysis of Current Healthcare Proposals: Obama and McCain

The healthcare system of the U.S. is broken. The next opportunity for overwhelming healthcare system reform will be when the next president takes office. This paper analyzes the 2008 presidential election candidates McCain and Obama healthcare proposals through a look at key players in the current healthcare system (government, pharmaceuticals, doctors, hospitals, and health insurance companies) and the affects of implementing such a plan. The presidential plans are presented side by side. Projected outcomes of the changes offered by Obama will be an increased role of the government and decreased power of the health insurance companies while increasing coverage. The McCain plan would have more choice for individuals with a transparent system, and less governmental bureaucracy while embracing the free market competition of the health insurance industry. There will be obstacles and/or resistance to any reform passed by the presidential elect, no matter which man had won

Ethics With an Attitude: Comments on New Directions for Keck Philanthropy

Terrell asserts that the W. M. Keck Foundation should turn its attention to a different set of challenges and opportunities involving legal ethics and the future of the legal profession. The education emphasis for the foundation should shift to the busy practitioner

Assembling the Proofs of Ordered Model Transformations

In model-driven development, an ordered model transformation is a nested set of transformations between source and target classes, in which each transformation is governed by its own pre and post- conditions, but structurally dependent on its parent. Following the proofs-as-model-transformations approach, in this paper we consider a formalisation in Constructive Type Theory of the concepts of model and model transformation, and show how the correctness proofs of potentially large ordered model transformations can be systematically assembled from the proofs of the specifications of their parts, making them easier to derive.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2013, arXiv:1302.478

Retention of Undergraduate Minority Students in Institutions of Higher Education

This article is concerned with the retention of minority undergraduate students, offering recommendations which contribute to a higher rate of student retention in postsecondary institutions. The first section provides a brief introduction to the state-of-the-art concerning attrition and retention. The development of a retention program for minority students comprises the second, more comprehensive section. It provides a listing of resources concerned with the problem. Concluding recommendations are presented which can contribute to the successful retention of minority students

What Drives the Speed of Job Reallocation During Episodes of Massive Adjustment?

This paper uses individual-level data to characterize economy-wide job creation and destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment. We contrast the gradualist Czech and the rapid Estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy to provide evidence on selected macroeconomic theories of reallocation with frictions. We find that gradualism (slowing down job destruction) effectively synchronizes job creation and destruction. Drastic job destruction leads to little or no slowdown of job creation. Small newly established firms are the under-researched fountainhead of jobs during the transition from communist to market oriented economies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39816/3/wp432.pd

Institutional Determinants of Labor Reallocation in Transition

Studying the transition means analyzing the interactions between institutions and structural change, a process we still know very little about. In this paper we show that the transition process has been very different in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and those of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in terms of reallocation of labor from the old to the new sector, the extent of real wage decline and responsiveness of employment to output changes. We sift through the theoretical and empirical literature to find an explanation for these diverging adjustment trajectories and conclude that the difference can be explained in part by different policy models. The CEE countries adopted social policies that upheld wages at the bottom of the distribution and hence forced the unproductive old sector to restructure or collapse. The FSU countries allowed wages to free fall and hence did not force the hand of the old sector. Why these two models were adopted is the subject for political-economy research, however we speculate that it has to do with the relative appeal of joining the EU.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39768/3/wp384.pd

An algorithm for the rapid location of an extreme of a function subject only to geometric restrictions

The requirements of symmetry and convexity in the application of algorithms for the minimization or maximization of a function are discussed. It is argued that if a function of a single variable is convex and symmetric in a neighborhood of an extremum, the extremum may be approximated to the precision that increases by at least a power of two per functional evaluation. The procedure may be used to drive a complex optimization procedure in the multivariate area estimation problem encountered in remote sensing

U.S banks in Japan and Japanese banks in the United States: an empirical comparison

Japan ; Banks and banking - Japan ; Banks and banking, Foreign - United States

Explaining Gender Differences in Unemployment with Micro Data on Flows in Post-Communist Economies

Post-communist labor markets provide an interesting laboratory since unemployment rates grew from zero to double digits and gender differences began to vary greatly across these countries. We provide the first systematic analysis of the determinants of the gender unemployment gap in the Czech Republic using a method that decomposes unemployment rates into transition probabilities (flows) between labor market states, which we calculate using Labor Force Survey data. We extend the analysis to other post-communist economies by evaluating the flows available from existing studies with the decomposition framework. We further examine the flows in the Czech Republic by estimating gender-specific multinomial logit models to learn which factors (demographic, regional, cyclical) other than gender and marital status affect unemployment. We find that women’s lower probability of exiting unemployment for a job explains the lion’s share of the gender gap in the unemployment rates in the Czech Republic and the other post-communist countries for which studies exist. This is also the principal factor explaining married women’s higher unemployment rates compared to married men in the Czech Republic. On the other hand, single men and women’s rates are higher than married men and women’s because they are twice as likely to lose/leave a job for unemployment. We find that age and education are systematically important in explaining flows of both men and women in all these economies, as it is in the more developed industrial economies. The less educated are more likely to be laid off or quit and less likely to find a job. Whereas younger individuals are more likely to be laid off or quit, they are also more likely to find a job.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39891/3/wp506.pd