One-third of a century has elapsed since the Social Security Act of 1935 laid the “cornerstone” for the Nation’s social insurance system. Far from undermining national institutions, the program has made significant contributions toward strengthening those institutions. More children are spending more years in school, in part because OASDHI benefits are available to maintain family income even w...

The four major penal institutions for men in Washington state were surveyed in June 1983, to assess the quality of tuberculosis screening and the proportion of residents who were reactors. A total of 4,744 medical charts of current residents were reviewed of which 4,269 (90.0 percent) had skin test results recorded. The proportion of inmates residing in the four institutions during 1983 who wer...

We propose several econometric measures of connectedness based on principal-components analysis and Granger-causality networks, and apply them to the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, broker/dealers, and insurance companies. We find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated over the past decade, likely increasing the level of systemic risk in the finance and insurance industrie...

This report documents the prompt, co-ordinated and effective public health response to a measles outbreak in Queensland in 2013. There were 17 cases in a large, high-security, regional correctional facility, a setting with unique challenges. Recommendations are provided to reduce the likelihood and magnitude of measles outbreaks in correctional facilities.

The da Vinci S surgical system (Intuitive Surgical) was approved as a medical device in 2009 by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Robotic surgery has since been used in gastrointestinal, thoracic, gynecological, and urological surgeries. In April 2012, robotic-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RALP) was first approved for insurance coverage. Since then, RALP has be...

ABX.HE indexed credit default swaps on baskets of mortgage-backed securities are now the main benchmark used by financial institutions to mark their subprime mortgage portfolios to market. However, we find that current prices for the ABX.HE indices are inconsistent with any reasonable assumption for mortgage default rates, and that ABX.HE price changes are only very weakly correlated with obser...

Market discipline will be one of the three building blocks of Solvency II, but not much attention has been paid to this aspect, either by academics or practitioners. The aim of this paper is to summarize the knowledge on market discipline in insurance and in other sectors of financial services. Looking at banking is especially interesting, since much more study has been done of market disciplin...

Financial constraints in smallholder agriculture remain pervasive developing countries like Ethiopia. The government of Ethiopia is doing its best to tackle the financial bottleneck through inclusion and several institutional arrangements that hinder smallholders’ represent landslide figure country. This review aimed at finding institutions serving smallholders country, evaluating mode service ...