Market failure, policy failure and other distortions in chronic disease markets

Background: The increasing prevalence of chronic disease represents a significant burden on most health systems. This paper explores the market failures and policy failures that exist in the management of chronic diseases.
Discussion: There are many sources of market failure in health care that undermine the efficiency of chronic disease management. These include incomplete information as well as information asymmetry between providers and consumers, the effect of externalities on consumer behaviour, and the divergence between social and private time preference rates. This has seen government and policy interventions to address both market failures and distributional issues resulting from the inability of private markets to reach an efficient and equitable distribution of resources. However, these have introduced a series of policy failures such as distorted re-imbursement arrangements across modalities and delivery settings.
Summary: The paper concludes that market failure resulting from a preference of individuals for 'immediate gratification' in the form of health care and disease management, rather than preventative services, where the benefits are delayed, has a major impact on achieving an efficient allocation of resources in markets for the management of chronic diseases. This distortion is compounded by government health policy that tends to favour medical and pharmaceutical interventions further contributing to distortions in the allocation of resources and inefficiencies in the management of chronic disease.

Has political instability contributed to price clustering on Fiji's stock market?

The goal of this article is to examine evidence of stock price clustering on the South Pacific Stock Exchange, located in Fiji, and explore its determinants. We find that stock prices cluster at the decimal of 0 and 5, with almost half of prices settling on these two decimals. Upon investigating the determinants of price clustering on the South Pacific Stock Exchange we find that price level and volume of trade have a statistically significant positive effect on price clustering. We also propose and test a ‘panic trading’ hypothesis which states political instability induces price clustering. We find evidence that political instability in Fiji induces price clustering behaviour.

Initiation of trades on the Chinese stock market

The flow of orders from buyers and sellers, relative to past returns and stock characteristics, was examined in the Chinese stock market. Order imbalance (the gap between buyer-and seller-initiated trades) was found to be negatively related to long term returns. Turn of the calendar year trading provided strong indications of tax-motivated trading as well as support for the flight-to-quality hypothesis, which suggests selling in response to perceived increases in market risk.

Predicting future earnings growth: a test of the dividend payout ratio in the Australian market

This paper examines the use of the payout ratio as a predictor of a firm’s future earnings growth. Recent evidence rejects the hypothesis that firm which retain a large portion of their earnings have strong future earnings growth. Higher dividend payout ratios instead correspond to higher future earnings growth. Examining both listed and delisted firms on the Australian stock exchange over the period 1989 to 2008, we provide further evidence that the dividend payout ratio is positively linked to future earnings growth. The results hold over both one, three and five year periods. Furthermore, our results rejected claims that such a relationship was caused by simple mean reversion in earnings. We find no evidence to support the cash flow signaling and free cash flow hypotheses as an explanation for this relationship.

Can Peto's paradox be used as the null hypothesis to identify the role of evolution in natural resistance to cancer? A critical review

BACKGROUND: Carcinogenesis affects not only humans but almost all metazoan species. Understanding the rules driving the occurrence of cancers in the wild is currently expected to provide crucial insights into identifying how some species may have evolved efficient cancer resistance mechanisms. Recently the absence of correlation across species between cancer prevalence and body size (coined as Peto's paradox) has attracted a lot of attention. Indeed, the disparity between this null hypothesis, where every cell is assumed to have an identical probability to undergo malignant transformation, and empirical observations is particularly important to understand, due to the fact that it could facilitate the identification of animal species that are more resistant to carcinogenesis than expected. Moreover it would open up ways to identify the selective pressures that may be involved in cancer resistance. However, Peto's paradox relies on several questionable assumptions, complicating the interpretation of the divergence between expected and observed cancer incidences. DISCUSSIONS: Here we review and challenge the different hypotheses on which this paradox relies on with the aim of identifying how this null hypothesis could be better estimated in order to provide a standard protocol to study the deviation between theoretical/theoretically predicted and observed cancer incidence. We show that due to the disproportion and restricted nature of available data on animal cancers, applying Peto's hypotheses at species level could result in erroneous conclusions, and actually assume the existence of a paradox. Instead of using species level comparisons, we propose an organ level approach to be a more accurate test of Peto's assumptions. SUMMARY: The accuracy of Peto's paradox assumptions are rarely valid and/or quantifiable, suggesting the need to reconsider the use of Peto's paradox as a null hypothesis in identifying the influence of natural selection on cancer resistance mechanisms.

Constructing an ‘efficient frontier’ of accounting journal quality

This paper reports the construction of an ‘efficient frontier’ of the perceived quality attributes of academic accountingjournals. The analysis is based on perception data from two web-based surveys of Australasian and British academics.The research reported here contributes to the existing literature by augmenting the commonly supported singledimension of quality with an additional measure indicating the variation of perceptions of journal quality. The result ofcombining these factors is depicted diagrammatically in a manner that reflects the risk and return trade-off asconceptualised in the capital market model of an efficient frontier of investment opportunities. This conceptualisation of a‘market’ for accounting research provides a context in which to highlight the complex issues facing academics in their rolesas editors, researchers and authors.The analysis indicates that the perceptions of the so-called ‘elite’ US accounting journals have become unsettledparticularly in Australasia, showing high levels of variability in perceived quality, while other traditionally highly rankedjournals (ABR, AOS, CAR) have a more ‘efficient’ combination of high-quality ranking and lower dispersion ofperceptions. The implications of these results for accounting academics in the context of what is often seen as a market foraccounting research are discussed.