Investigation of the driven mechanism of the price dynamics in complex financial systems is important and challenging. In this paper, we propose an investment strategy to study how dynamic fluctuations drive the price movements. The strategy is successfully applied to different stock markets in the world, and the result indicates that the driving effect of the dynamic fluctuations is rather rob...

OBJECTIVES We hypothesised that among nursing home decedents, nursing home for-profit status and poor quality-of-care ratings, as well as patient characteristics, would lower the likelihood of transfer to hospital prior to heart disease death. METHODS Using death certificates from a large metropolitan area (Tampa Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area) for 1998-2002, we geocoded residential st...

Objectives: This paper evaluates the drivers of profitability for a large sample of U.S. hospitals. Following a methodology frequently used by financial analysts, we use a DuPont analysis as a framework to evaluate the quality of earnings. By decomposing returns on equity (ROE) into profit margin, total asset turnover, and capital structure, the DuPont analysis reveals what drives overall profi...

BACKGROUND A global budgeting system helps control the growth of healthcare spending by setting expenditure ceilings. However, the hospital global budget implemented in Taiwan in 2002 included a special provision: drug expenditures are reimbursed at face value, while other expenditures are subject to discounting. That gives hospitals, particularly those that are for-profit, an incentive to incr...

Tax-exempt status has long been perceived as appropriate for the traditional retirement home (i.e., congregate housing and life-care facility), which serves the elderly and typically experiences low profit margins. An organization that is both organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes or for testing for public safety may qualify ...

Governments world-wide have attempted to use market mechanisms and privatisation to increase the quality and/or reduce the cost of healthcare. England's Health and Social Care Act 2012 is an attempt to promote privatisation through marketisation in the National Health Service (NHS). While the health policy literature tends to assume that privatisation follows from private-sector entry points, w...

The effect of land fragmentation on agriculture has worried policymakers for a long time because it is expected to be a negative effect. Land consolidation policies are frequently implemented to soften the degree of land fragmentation. However, to the authors' knowledge, no study in the dairy sector has empirically analyzed the role of land fragmentation on farm productivity and profits. This s...

This paper analyzes the possibility of a monopoly firm selling and renting a packaged software product. It employs a simple model to analyze the firm's pricing strategy. We observe that the introduction of the rental product leads to an increase in profits, an increase in selling and a decrease in rental prices as a function of the rate of change of the rental price with respect to the quantity...