Hispanic Ethnicity Is Associated With Increased Hospital Charges After Radical Cystectomy in the United States

Objective: To examine the impact of race and ethnicity on financial charges associated with radical cystectomy (RC). Data Sources/Study Setting: The Nationwide Inpatient Sample was used to identify patients who underwent RC for bladder cancer between 1998 and 2010. Study Design: The primary outcome was total hospital charges adjusted for inflation. Multivariate analysis was performed using a generalized linear model on the logarithmically transformed outcome variable (total hospital charges) after adjusting for age, sex, race, Elixhauser comorbidities, surgical approach, year, primary payer, hospital and surgeon annual RC volume, hospital characteristics, and postoperative complications. Principle findings: A total of 14,873 patients were identified. Hispanic and black patients were more likely to be treated by low-volume surgeons and/or institutions (both P=.07). Conclusions: Hispanic ethnicity but not black race predicts higher hospital charges after RC

Instrumentation of sampling aircraft for measurement of launch vehicle effluents

An aircraft was selected and instrumented to measure effluents emitted from large solid propellant rockets during launch activities. The considerations involved in aircraft selection, sampling probes, and instrumentation are discussed with respect to obtaining valid airborne measurements. Discussions of the data acquisition system used, the instrument power system, and operational sampling procedures are included. Representative measurements obtained from an actual rocket launch monitoring activity are also presented

Spiral Waves in Media with Complex Excitable Dynamics

The structure of spiral waves is investigated in super-excitable reaction-diffusion systems where the local dynamics exhibits multi-looped phase space trajectories. It is shown that such systems support stable spiral waves with broken symmetry and complex temporal dynamics. The main structural features of such waves, synchronization defect lines, are demonstrated to be similar to those of spiral waves in systems with complex-oscillatory dynamics.Comment: to appear in International Journal of Bifurcation and Chao

The Clinton Administration\u27s Vision for Economic Development

The 20th anniversary of the Governor’s Economic Development Conference last October focused on the impact of public policy on the competitiveness of Maine’s business and industry. Among many other important presentations, the University of Maine-sponsored conference featured a televideo keynote address by the Clinton Administration’s top economic adviser, Laura D’Andrea Tyson. Tyson’s remarks, which detailed the Administration’s policy initiatives meant to enhance the nation’s competitiveness relative to the international economy, are presented in this article

ESSAYS ON FINANCIAL INCENTIVES

In my first chapter, I use a novel dataset of customer reviews from Amazon.com to study the impact of managerial myopia on product market reputation. Using exogenous variation due to the timing of CEO equity vesting events, I show that short-term incentive shocks predict declines in reputation. A changing product market lineup and a deterioration of existing products are two mechanisms through which reputation is affected. The effect is larger when the CEO has other short-term concerns and when the firm has a low reputation in the product market. However, higher advertising expenses mitigate the negative reputational effect among consumers. Using an alternative empirical methodology, I find that higher short-term ownership in the firm is also associated with declining product market reputation, while higher long-term ownership is associated with increasing reputation. My second chapter uses a different setting to examine the consequences of personal wealth incentives. We test whether household wealth shocks affect professional misconduct by financial advisors. We use a panel of advisors\u27 home addresses and examine within-advisor variation relative to other advisors who work at the same firm and live in the same ZIP code. We show that advisors increase misconduct following declines in their homes\u27 values. The increased misconduct is due, in part, to willful actions, such as churning. We show that advisors\u27 housing returns explain misconduct targeting out-of-state customers, breaking the link between customer and advisor housing shocks. Further, the results are stronger for advisors with lower career risk from committing misconduct

The debate between postmodernism and historiography: An accounting historian’s manifesto

Garry Carnegie recently concluded that ‘the key development in accounting historiography between 1983 and 2012 has been the advent of new accounting history’. We agree and believe that the debate in accounting reflects a greater debate between postmodern and traditional historians – one which questions both the nature of historiography and the historian’s role in society. As a participant in this debate, Michael Gaffikin criticized traditionalists (in accounting) for failing to assess developments in the general history literature. This article responds to Gaffikin’s critique. We initially describe the key issues in the debate between postmodern and traditional historians. We review the current general history literature and then recount how the debate played out in three distinct episodes in accounting historiography in which the authors directly participated. We conclude by assessing the current state of accounting historiography