Opthalmic Teaching Problems: The Ayes Have It

The problems associated with the teaching of ophthalmology to medical students in today\u27s university setting are by no means unique to ophthalmology. However, these problems are more severe in small departments such as ophthalmology and are more disruptive to the teaching process than similar problems in larger departments. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the more important teaching problems and propose solutions to them

Quantitative theory and econometrics

Econometrics ; Money theory

Theme Overview: Local Food - Perceptions, Prospects, and Policies

Local Food, Relocalization, Consumer Perception, Growth Prospects, Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Commentary on "House prices and the stance of monetary policy "

Monetary policy ; Housing - Prices

Supply Chain Design for High Quality Products: Economic Concepts and Examples form the United States

The food system is undergoing significant structural change at local, national, and international levels. As the food system evolves, some segments along the chain between producers and consumers are disappearing. Others are being transformed. Supply chain concepts are useful for identifying and assessing alternative designs for the reconfiguration of food product production systems. Changes in the food system will require farm managers to adopt new ways of thinking and new perspectives on collaboration with trading partners. They also will require farm management economists to draw on a wider set of economic theories and concepts than we have in the past. This paper begins with brief descriptions of emerging supply chains for high quality food products in the U.S.: (i) a branded product chain, (ii) a genetics-based chain, and (iii) a production-practice based chain. These illustrate the variety of emerging supply chain structures and the challenges firms face in designing new supply chains. The next section presents an overview of key elements of four theoretical frameworks that are helpful in supply chain analysis and design: (i) transaction cost economics, (ii) agency theory, (iii) property rights theory, and (iv) the resource based view of the firm. Concepts from these theories are used to explain structural differences in the three illustrative cases. Looking to the future, key challenges include improving system-wide efficiency through information sharing and logistics management, promoting transparency and trust among trading partners, and designing incentive systems that ensure an equitable distribution of costs and returns.Farm Management,

Discretionary policy and multiple equilibria

Monetary policy ; Equilibrium (Economics)

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR COMMODITY MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Marketing,

Time-Separable Preference and Intertemporal-Substitution Models of Business Cycles

Time-separability of utility means that past work and consumption do not influence current and future tastes. This form of preferences does not restrict the size of intertemporal-substitution effects--notably, we can still have a strong response of labor supply to temporary changes in wages. However, there are important constraints on the relative responses of leisure and consumption to changes in relative-price and in permanent income. When the usual aggregation is permissible, time-separability has some important implications for equilibrium theories of the business cycle. Neglecting investment, we, find that changes in perceptions about the future -- which night appear currently as income effects -- have no influence on current equilibrium output. With investment included, no combination of income effects and shifts to the perceived profitability of investment will yield positive co-movements of output, employment, investment and consumption. Therefore, misperceived monetary disturbances or other sources of changed beliefs about the future cannot be used to generate empirically recognizable business cycles. Some richer specifications of intertemporal production opportunities may eventually yield more satisfactory answers. Because of the positive correlation between cyclical movements of consumption and work, equilibrium theories with time-separable preferences inevitably predict a procyclical behavior for the real wage rate, arising from shifts to labor's marginal product. Empirically, we regard the cyclical behavior of real wages as an open question. Aside from analyzing autonomous real shocks to productivity, we suggest that such shifts may occur as firms vary their capital utilization in response to intertemporal relative prices. However, we still lack some parts of a complete theory.