Putting home economics into macroeconomics

The implications of adding household production to an otherwise standard real business cycle model are explored in this article. The model developed treats the business and household sectors symmetrically. In particular, both sectors use capital and labor to produce output. The article finds that the household production model can outperform the standard model in accounting for several aspects of U.S. business cycle fluctuations. ; This article is a summary of a chapter prepared for a forthcoming book, Frontiers of Business Cycle Research, edited by Thomas F. Cooley, to be published by Princeton University Press.Business cycles

Regulatory incentives and financial reporting quality in public healthcare organisations

English National Health Service Foundation Trusts are subject to a regulatory regime in which the level of monitoring and intervention is determined by performance against two key performance metrics: a ‘financial risk rating’, based on a number of performance metrics, such as the reported surplus margin and return on assets, and a ‘prudential borrowing limit’. In this paper, we investigate the variation in financial reporting quality, proxied by discretionary accruals, with the incentives introduced by this regime. We find: first, that discretionary accruals are managed to report small surpluses; second, that, consistent with the avoidance of regulatory intervention in both the short and medium term, discretionary accruals are more positive when pre-managed performance is below intervention triggering thresholds and more negative when well above threshold; third, that, despite a move away from financial breakeven as the primary performance objective, there remains an aversion to small loss reporting. We further find that the level of discretionary accruals is driven by two metrics of strategic significance: the surplus margin (a measure of retained earnings) and the prudential borrowing limit (a measure of borrowing capacity)

Targeted monitoring for human pharmaceuticals in vulnerable source and final waters

A range of pharmaceuticals has been detected in soils, surface waters and groundwaters across the world. While the reported concentrations are generally low (i.e. sub μg l-1 in surface waters), the substances have been observed throughout the year across a variety of hydrological, climatic and land-use settings. As a result, questions have been raised over the potential for pharmaceuticals in surface waters to enter drinking water supplies and to affect consumers. In a previous Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) funded study, results from a simple exposure model were used alongside information on therapeutic doses of pharmaceuticals to identify pharmaceuticals that are likely to be of most concern in UK drinking water sources. However, this previous study was entirely desk-based and did not involve any experimental measurements of pharmaceutical concentrations. The current study was therefore performed to generate actual measurements on the occurrence of pharmaceuticals in source and treated waters in England. The study considered a range of pharmaceutical compounds and their metabolites that have either a) high predicted exposure concentrations; b) toxicological concerns; or c) a low predicted exposure to therapeutic dose ratio. An illicit drug and its major metabolite were also investigated. The study compounds (in total 17) covered a range of chemical classes and varied in terms of their physico-chemical properties. The study was done at four sites where concentrations in source water at the drinking water treatment abstraction point were predicted to be some of the greatest in England. The study therefore is likely to provide a ‘worst case’ assessment of potential human exposure to pharmaceuticals in drinking water in England and Wales. Ten of the 17 study compounds were detected in untreated source waters at sub-μg/l concentrations. Six of these compounds (namely, benzoylecgonine (a metabolite of cocaine), caffeine, carbamazepine (an antiepileptic medicine), carbamazepine epoxide (a metabolite of carbamazepine), ibuprofen and naproxen (both non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) were also detected in treated drinking water. With the exception of carbamazepine epoxide, concentrations in treated drinking water were generally significantly lower than in source water. Even though England is a densely populated country and in some regions there is limited dilution of wastewater effluents, these observations, made at sites that were predicted to have some of the highest concentrations of pharmaceuticals in England and Wales, are in line with results from similar studies performed in other countries. Comparison of measured concentrations of the study compounds in drinking waters with information on therapeutic doses demonstrated that levels of these compounds in drinking water in England are many orders of magnitude lower than levels that are given to patients therapeutically. It would therefore appear that the low or non-detectable levels of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs present in drinking waters in England and Wales do not pose an appreciable risk to human health

A new CH carbonaceous chondrite from Acfer, Algeria

A single stone weighing 1456 g was found in November 2002 in the Acfer area, Algeria. Oxygen isotope, chondrules-matrix ratio as well as other petrographic features point to a classification as CH carbonaceous chondrite

Using Quality Mechanisms to Solve a Practice Service Business Problem of Reducing Delinquent Payments

This study focuses on the problem of small service business debt collection from delinquent customer accounts and the ways in which quality control methods can be applied to analyzing the occurrence of past due payments. Small businesses like Helthkare Products, LLC are particularly vulnerable to the risk of lower finances because of a limited source of revenue. Their customer bases tend to be smaller and therefore cannot afford to have too much outstanding debt from its customers because it puts them in a position of having a reduced working capital. The use of quality control can help small businesses understand their customers as well as their own internal business processes to make them more efficient so as to avoid and reduce delinquent payments

Tourism

Sydney has been shaped by tourism but in a large metropolis, where tourist experiences so often overlap with everyday activity, its impact often escapes attention. Urban tourism involves not just international visitors, but people from interstate and regional NSW and even day trippers, who all see and use the city differently. Tourist Sydney has never been the same as workaday Sydney – the harbour, beaches, city centre, the Blue Mountains and national parks to the north and south loomed disproportionately large in the tourist gaze, while vast swathes of suburbia were invisible