Big-ticket Items Research Articles

National–Local Synergies for Development: How a Local Political Machine Delivered Infrastructure Results in Iloilo City

The upsurge in big-ticket infrastructure projects in Iloilo City for the past two decades owes much to the developmental alliance amongst Senator Franklin Drilon as the national government benefactor, multi-term city mayors, and the local business sector. These government officials’ prolonged tenure in office afforded a stable political leadership that ensured long-term planning around key infrastructure projects and continued access to national government funding. Robust institutional and informal ties between political and economic elites enabled consensus-building on the virtues of market-driven growth for which infrastructure is key. The Drilon political machine orchestrated a diverse but astutely networked group of local businesses by involving them in formal participatory planning processes, thereby facilitating approval of big-ticket items, and by influencing bureaucrats from national government agencies to approve the projects.

OP107 Streamlining Health Technology Assessment Of Medical Devices Through Development Of The Philippine Essential Medical Device List

IntroductionPursuant to the Universal Health Care Act of 2019, the Health Technology Assessment Council (HTAC) in the Philippines was mandated to make recommendations for government financing of health technologies, including medical devices. The development of a Philippine Essential Medical Device List (PEMDL) will serve as a guide for the procurement of medical devices and supplies in government health facilities and as the basis for creating a price reference index.MethodsThe HTAC and a team of medical device experts (the Expert Advisory Committee) developed a streamlined pathway and guidelines using a Delphi technique with the Philippine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health (DOH) to determine the necessary criteria for fast tracking the inclusion of medical devices. The pathway was also revised throughout a pilot processing of commonly procured medical devices (e.g., consumables) that were either already covered by existing national health insurance packages or funded by DOH programs, among others.ResultsThe final pathway consisted of validating whether the device was already approved by the Philippine FDA and whether it was already part of standard of care. Similar to the usual HTA nomination requirement, the local FDA approval attested to the safety and quality of the device. Meanwhile, the inclusion of the device in the standard of care guaranteed that it was essential in the healthcare setting. This can be written in the World Health Organization technical documents and databases such as the Medical Devices Information System, health facility listing requirements, or locally adopted clinical practice guidelines. The initial PEMDL for release contained a total of 307 medical devices across 16 categories.ConclusionsUnlike the mandate for the Philippine National Formulary, government health facilities are not yet required to base their procurement on the PEMDL because the list is still in its infancy. Moving forward, the list will include big ticket items and will be updated through consultations with specialty centers and hospitals.

Information interventions can increase technology adoption through information network restructuring

SummaryThe rapid adoption of residential solar photovoltaic (PV) is recasting the role of individual households as a dynamic and potent construct critical for emissions mitigation and resilience of the electricity system. As residential PV enters more risk-averse customer segments, broader deployment of residential PV depends on overcoming both financial and informational barriers to adoption. Fast-changing residential PV technologies and associated policies means there is both lack of information and often misinformation among customers—gaps that are addressed effectively with local, trusted information networks, especially for big-ticket items such as residential PV. Here, we use an extensively validated agent-based model of residential PV adoption to analyze the effectiveness of different information intervention designs in spurring PV diffusion. We show that intervention designs are effective when they balance long-distance connections and local reinforcement, matching the intervention to both the informational needs of potential adopters and the structure of the underlying network.

Deductions at the source

Adam Bernstein outlines a new temporary allowance that can be used to fund big ticket items in optical practices

Unemployment after the Great Recession: Why so High? What Can We Do?

The surprising increase in U.S. unemployment in the Great Recession and the persistence of long-term unemployment in the economic recovery pose important questions for employment policy. Why did unemployment grow more than forecast? Is the character of long-term unemployment the result of cyclical or structural causes? I discuss eight policy changes that would reduce the ranks of the unemployed and that would improve the efficiency of the labor market. Most of these proposals do not add big-ticket items to the Federal budget; their merits are independent of the question of how large the federal deficit should be at this time.

Impact of financial development on CO2 emissions: A comparative analysis of developing countries (D8) and developed countries (G8).

Financial development is one of the key drivers of rapid economic growth as well as CO2 emission in the environment. This study aims to investigate the casual links between financial development and CO2 emission in G8 and D8 countries for the time period from 1999 to 2013. We used PCA to develop financial development index from its five sub-components. Second-generation panel unit root tests are applied to check the stationary level and to tackle the presence of cross-sectional dependence in panels. The empirical results of PMG-panel ARDL technique show that financial development has significant and positive impact on carbon emission at a 1% statistical level in both panels in the long-run. The impact of financial development and energy consumption is more evident in D8 and G8 countries respectively. The energy use and trade openness affect positively while GDP significantly causes to decline the carbon emissions at 1% statistical level. The results of D-H causality test show that majority of the variables have one-way causality towards CO2emission in both panels except the financial development and energy use having two-way causality in G8 panel only. The empirical findings of the present study suggest that through improved financial system, more funds should be invested in clean energy projects to adopt the renewable energy, strict monetary policies should be implemented to reduce the consumption of big ticket items, and adoption of measure to reduce trade embodied emission is suggested.

From A to F: Grading the Fiscal Transparency of Canada’s Cities, 2019

Financial presentations are key tools for Canadians who want to understand what their governments are doing with their money, and hold them to account. Unfortunately, Canada’s cities do not typically present information that lets Canadians do this. The problem is not so much their end-of-year financial statements as their budgets: nearly every major Canadian city presents budgets that separate current spending and capital spending on big-ticket items, and use accounting and aggregation methods that are inconsistent with their financial statements. Worse, many make the key numbers hard to find and recognize, and councillors often vote these non-transparent budgets after the fiscal year has already started and money has gone out the door. Bad budgeting practices impede councillors, taxpayers and voters seeking accountability from city staff and elected representatives. Simple information, such as how much the municipality plans to spend this year, or how its spending plan this year compares with the previous year’s plan, is hard or impossible for a non-expert to find. Moreover, the differences between how the numbers appear in budgets and in year-end financial statements have real-world consequences. Budgets that exclude key services such as water and the user fees that fund them, for example, understate their claim on community resources. Budgeting the cost of capital items on an up-front, cash basis, rather than recording the relevant expenses over the useful life of the asset through accrual accounting, exaggerates the cost of infrastructure investments, hides the cost of pension obligations, and undermines intergenerational fairness by mismatching costs and benefits over time. This report card grades the financial presentations of 31 major Canadian municipalities, based on their most recent budgets and financial statements. Of those we assessed, Durham Region, Windsor, London, Quebec City, Laval and Longueuil fail, providing little information in reader-friendly form. More happily, Vancouver garners an A+ for the clarity and completeness of its financial presentations, followed by Surrey and Richmond, each with an A-. Our overarching recommendation is that municipal governments should present budgets using the same public sector accounting standards (PSAS) and format that they use in their year-end financial statements. Most do not, and those that present supplementary PSAS-consistent information in their budgets typically do not do it in userfriendly ways. One key implication of this change would be that municipal budgets would use accrual accounting with respect to capital, recording revenues and expenses as assets deliver their services. Provincial governments that impede the preparation of PSAS-consistent municipal budgets – by mandating that cities present separate operating and capital budgets, for example – should stop doing so. Better would be to require cities to present PSAS-consistent budgets. Municipalities in provinces that continue to impede PSAS-consistent budgets can, and should, release the relevant information on their own. A second implication of this change is that municipal budgets, like municipal financial statements, would show city-wide consolidated, gross revenue and spending figures that represent the city’s full claim on its citizens’ resources and the full scope of its activities. Our second key recommandation is that cities should present and concillors should vote, budgets before the beginning of the fiscal year. These changes would help raise the fiscal accountability of Canada’s municipalities to a level more commensurate with their importance in Canadians’ lives.

Small Finds, Big Values: Cylinder Seals and Coins from Iraq and Syria on the Online Market

Abstract:Discussions about looted antiquities often focus on large, culturally and monetarily valuable items. Nevertheless, it is clear that mundane small finds, which sell for relatively small amounts, account for a large portion of the global market in antiquities. This article highlights two types of small artifacts—namely, cylinder seals and coins, presumed to come from Syria and Iraq and offered for sale by online vendors. We argue that the number of cylinder seals and coins sold on the Internet has increased steadily since 2011, reaching a peak in 2016–17. This shows that the trade in Iraqi and Syrian antiquities has shifted from big-ticket items sold in traditional brick-and-mortar shops to small items readily available on the Internet for modest prices. The continuing growth of the online market in antiquities is having a devastating effect on the archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria as increasing demand fuels further looting in the region.

To Bargain or Not to Bargain: The Role of Fixed Costs in Price Negotiations

Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price for big-ticket items such as home appliances and automobiles, and on online platforms such as Amazon and eBay. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to selling only at posted prices, depends on consumers’ willingness to initiate a negotiation and ability to negotiate a discount. In this article, the authors incorporate consumers’ decision of whether to negotiate into a demand model. The decision to negotiate hinges on how the expected discount from negotiation compares with the magnitude of a nonpecuniary cost that the consumer incurs by initiating the negotiation. The current study shows how this cost can be nonparametrically identified, separately from consumers’ ability to get a discount and marginal utility of income. The application of this model to individual-level data on refrigerator transactions reveals that, conditional on negotiating, consumers get, on average, 41% of the available surplus and incur an average cost of $28 to initiate a negotiation. The magnitude of these nonpecuniary costs’ not only affects retailer profits but also has implications for pricing strategy and consumer surplus. Ignoring these costs results in biased estimates of consumers’ willingness to pay, translating to annual losses of $1.6 million in the current study setting.

The Euro

The Euro

To Bargain or Not to Bargain: The Role of Fixed Costs in Price Negotiations

ABSTRACT Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price, especially for big ticket items such as home appliances, furniture, automobiles, and real estate, as well as on online platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to selling only at posted prices, depends on consumers' willingness to initiate a negotiation and ability to negotiate a discount. In this paper, we incorporate a consumers' decision of whether or not to negotiate into a demand model. The decision to negotiate hinges on how the expected discount from negotiation compares to the magnitude of a non-pecuniary cost that the consumer incurs by initiating the negotiation. This cost has implications for consumer demand and firm profitability; the current study shows how this cost can be non-parametrically identified, separately from consumers' ability to get a discount and marginal utility of income. The application of this model to individual-level data on refrigera...

To Bargain or Not to Bargain - The Role of Fixed Costs in Price Negotiations

Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price, especially for big ticket items such as home appliances, furniture, automobiles, and real estate, as well as on online platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to selling only at posted prices, depends on consumers' willingness to initiate a negotiation and ability to negotiate a discount. In this paper, we incorporate a consumers' decision of whether or not to negotiate into a demand model. The decision to negotiate hinges on how the expected discount from negotiation compares to the magnitude of a non-pecuniary cost that the consumer incurs by initiating the negotiation. This cost has implications for consumer demand and firm profitability; the current study shows how this cost can be non-parametrically identified, separately from consumers' ability to get a discount and marginal utility of income. The application of this model to individual-level data on refrigerator transactions reveals that, conditional on negotiating, consumers get, on average, 41% of the available surplus and incur an average cost of $28 to initiate a negotiation, which is relatively smaller than the average gains. Demand estimates show that the magnitude of these non-pecuniary costs' affects retailer profits, and the retailer can increase profits by lowering these costs. A move to fixed pricing not only reduces retailers' profits by 37% but also lowers consumer surplus by 18%. Ignoring these costs results in biased estimates of consumers' willingness to pay, translating to annual losses of $1.6 million in the current study setting.

Does consumer confidence affect durable goods spending during bad and good economic times equally?

Recent econometric analysis shows consumer confidence innovations have long lasting effects on economic activities like consumption. Using US data, we show this conclusion is more nuanced when considering an economy that has different potential states. We investigate regime-switching models which use the National Bureau of Economic Research US business cycle expansion and contraction data to create an indicator series that distinguishes bad and good economic times and use this series to investigate impulse responses and variance decompositions. We show the connection between consumer confidence to some types of consumer purchases is important during good economic times, but is relatively unimportant during bad economic times. We also use this type of model to investigate the connection between news and consumer confidence and this connection is also shown to be state dependent. In the context of the animal spirits versus news debate, our findings show that during economic expansions, consumer confidence shocks likely reflect news, while during economic contractions, consumer confidence shocks are consistent with animal spirits. These findings also have important implications for recent policy debates which consider whether confidence boosting policies, like raising inflation expectations on big-ticket items such as automobiles or business equipment, would lead to a faster recovery.

Direct Primary Care: Concierge Care For The Masses.

Direct primary care represents a new model for providers eager to spend more time with fewer patients and bypass insurance headaches.

The Potential of New Transport Powers under Greater Manchester’s Devolution Settlement

Transport policy sits high on the devolution agenda in Greater Manchester. Of the many big ticket items in successive devolution agreements, transport stands out both in terms of the powers devolved and the funding attached. Through the newly constituted Transport for the North body it sits at the heart of the broader ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda. The pre-eminence of transport in the devolution agenda is justified. A more comprehensive and evolving transport network can enhance life in city-regions; it has the potential to underpin environmental sustainability, public health, social inclusion and economic growth. But the argument for transport devolution is not premised simply on transport’s importance. There is a strong and coherent argument for devolution of transport powers in order to plan, invest and manage an integrated and coherent transport network. Crucially this is something which cannot be left either to an unregulated market, or a centralised state, and which local government is ideally positioned to deliver.

Heterogeneity in Economic Shocks and Household Spending

Large swings in aggregate household-sector spending, especially for big ticket items such as cars and housing, have been a dominant feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the past two decades. Income and wealth inequality increased over the same period, leading some to suggest the two phenomena are interconnected. Indeed, there is supporting evidence for the idea that heterogeneity in economic shocks and spending are connected, most notably in studies using local-area geography as the unit of analysis. The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) provides a household-level perspective on changes in wealth, income, and spending across different types of families. The SCF confirms that inequality is indeed increasing in recent decades, and the data provide support for the proposition that shocks to income and wealth are indeed related to large swings in spending across and within birth cohorts. However, the economic shocks associated with the Great Recession and changes in spending and debt to income ratios are widespread, and inconsistent with a narrow focus on the experiences and changes in behavior of particular (especially low- and modest-income) households.

An Investigation of the Correlation between Happiness and Emotional Intelligence, Hypnotic Susceptibility and Gender

Happiness as a great people's need and effective thing is very important for life. The term happiness captures a huge variety of positive emotional responses, including such things as cheerfulness, serenity, optimism, andjoy.Throughout history, philosophers, religious writers and poets have pondered on the meaning of happiness and how it might be achieved. More recently, scientists, psychologists and even politicians, have joined the pursuit.A new study has identified a gene in women that is responsible for happiness. The correlation does not exist in men.According to research by the University of South Florida, scientists have found a link between a specific gene and women's likeliness to self-report happiness. The gene, known as monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), determines how the brain processes dopamine and serotonin, the chemicals responsible for making us smile.The greater the presence of this gene in women's DNA, the faster the brain breaks down these chemicals-meaning the quicker they're out of a person's system (or the shorter periodhappiness high can last). Low levels of the gene, on the flip side, means the feel good hormones stay in the brain for longer, meaning the woman is a happy one.After 34, men are more likely to be married than women, and the gap only widens with age, mirroring men's growing satisfaction with family life. Men also become more satisfied with their financial situations over time, as reflected in their increased spending power. The researchers found that men tend to covet big-ticket items that might not be within reach until later in life, such as a car or vacation home.These findings are consistent with an earlier study by Easterlin showing that recent generations arc less satisfied than previous generations, despite having more.Women and men in the same work and marital circumstances, women continue to be happier than Men. In the future, the turnaround in the relative happiness of women and men in later life is likely to continue, but the shift will be somewhat smaller in magnitude.Emotional intelligence worldwide provides practical applications of emotional intelligence, positive psychology and neuroscience to inspire people to achieve best possible outcomes for themselves and their organization. Our team lives and breathes this approach, practical tools anyone can use. We advise and accredit people in positive psychology tools and offer Australia's first and only Diploma of Positive Psychology & Wellbeing.Hypnotic susceptibility measures how easily a person can be hypnotized, hypnosis can be defined in numerous ways, all of them are correct, some definitions just speak more clearly to us than others, some definitions for hypnosis include: hypnosis is an altered state in which you bypass the critical faculty of your conscious mind and establish selective thinking in your subconscious mind, hypnosis is a state of heightened awareness dominated by the subconscious mind (padman pillai, wellness hypnotherapy clinic inc, m.sc., a.r.i.c., r.ht.), it involves guided concentration on one small thing to the exclusion of everything else, during hypnosis, brain wave patterns slow down to an alpha state indicative of alertness. At the same time, the brain loses the critical and reasoning ability that might otherwise cause it to reject suggestions. Hypnosis is an altered state within which suggestions have a peculiarly potent effect (Bowers).The increase in flare reaction in the time interval from 1 to 3 min during happiness and anger was significantly smaller than flare reactions during sadness (pMethodParticipantsThis study was done in the sample of 40 undergraduate and graduate so that 25% graduate and 75% undergraduate with the clusters sampling (10 women and 30 men. …

Bicycles and Juvenile Masculinity During World War I

Bicycles and Juvenile Masculinity During World War I Robert J. Turpin (bio) Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the bicycle was extremely popular. By 1900, however, sales in the United States experienced a dramatic fall. After coming to terms with the fact that the “Golden Age” of the bicycle was over, members of the bicycle industry undertook concerted efforts to recover sales. Those attempts included cooperative advertising and marketing efforts that might broaden the bicycle’s appeal beyond upper- and middle-class men. At first, the industry turned to “society women.” Women had actually taken to the bicycle a few decades earlier, but the industry had yet to concentrate advertising and marketing on females. Even after more attention was devoted to female riders in advertisements, there seemed to be little success in regaining women’s enthusiasm. This is evident in how short-lived that campaign would be in comparison with the industry’s next campaign—one that focused on a younger demographic. This essay focuses on the bicycle industry’s pursuit of juvenile consumers in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. It examines how anxieties aroused by World War I presented an opportunity to promote bicycles as beneficial for the nation. Attempts to exploit concerns about the nation’s fitness were so successful that the industry continued appeals to juveniles’ health, individualism, and patriotism well after the war was over. The connections the industry drew between these virtues and juveniles (specifically boys) left an indelible mark upon American ideals of mobility and masculinity. As a product of one of the first industries to base its marketing strategies on the emerging child consumer, the campaign to link bicycles with boys offered an example of how significant juvenile consumers had become. The strategies the industry employed to [End Page 51] capture the interest of juveniles reveal the social and cultural ideals that guided children’s entrance into American consumer society. Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears have argued that the genesis of American consumerism sprang from the preoccupations of white elite adults (1983, x). It would not take long, however, before American children also embraced values of consumerism. Steven Mintz shows that manufacturers soon marketed toys directly to children, but this development occurred earlier than he suggests. Whereas Mintz locates it in the late 1920s (2004, 217), Lisa Jacobson provides evidence that the targeting of child consumers began as early as 1911. By that time, children’s magazines such as American Boy “were trumpeting the untapped potential of the boy market and the dynamic salesmanship of the boy consumer in the advertising press. … During the interwar years … the child consumer became the focus of … advertising campaigns for everything from breakfast cereal and toys to big-ticket items such as radios and automobiles” (Jacobson 2004, 16–17). Such attempts to appeal directly to children were rife among marketing strategies of the bicycle industry even before the United States entered World War I. Jacobson acknowledges that the 1920s were a “major turning point in the field” as even the advertising trade itself, not just children’s magazines, “s[a]ng the praises of the child consumer” (28). The bicycle industry followed a similar path, at first experimenting with children’s advertisements in the first half of the 1910s. By the 1920s, it was poised to go all in. Jacobson argues that general marketing to boys marked a “privileging of boy culture” in a manner that offered psychic rewards to advertisers and that more overt appeals to boys’ consumer appetites demonstrated “advertisers’ new assessment of boy culture” (105, 123). This essay complicates her argument by contending that, at least for bicycle marketing, boys were also targeted because they were convenient. Not only were boys thought to be enterprising consumers who actively influenced their peers, thereby increasing sales, they also provided an opportunity for broadening appeals without reimaging the product. Therefore, the values promoted in bicycle marketing did not change from 1880 to 1920 but the demographic it targeted did. The success of those marketing tactics, which were largely based around masculine ideals, also demonstrate that rather than being a time for frivolity, boyhood had become an important stage of life in which...

Heterogeneity in Economic Shocks and Household Spending

Large swings in aggregate household-sector spending, especially for big ticket items such as cars and housing, have been a dominant feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the past two decades. Income and wealth inequality increased over the same period, leading some to suggest the two phenomena are interconnected. Indeed, there is supporting evidence for the idea that heterogeneity in economic shocks and spending are connected, most notably in studies using local-area geography as the unit of analysis. The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) provides a household-level perspective on changes in wealth, income, and spending across different types of families. The SCF confirms that inequality is indeed increasing in recent decades, and the data provide support for the proposition that shocks to income and wealth are indeed related to large swings in spending across and within birth cohorts. However, the economic shocks associated with the Great Recession and changes in spending and debt to income ratios are widespread, and inconsistent with a narrow focus on the experiences and changes in behavior of particular (especially low- and modest-income) households.

Workers go shopping in Argentina: the rise of popular consumer culture

In 1951 an Argentine newspaper announced that standard of living of workers in Argentina was the highest in world. More than half a century later, Argentines still look back to mid-twentieth century as golden years of Peronism, a time when working people, who had struggled to make ends meet a few years earlier, could now buy ready-made clothing, radios, and even big-ticket items like refrigerators. Milanesio explores this period marked by populist politics, industrialisation, and a fairer distribution of national income by analysing relations among consumers, consumer goods, manufacturers, advertising agents, and Juan Domingo Peron's government (1946-1955). Combining theories from anthropology of consumption, cultural studies and gender studies with methodologies of social, cultural and oral histories, Milanesio shows exceptional cultural and social visibility of low-income consumers in postwar Argentina along with their unprecedented economic and political influence. Her study reveals scope of remarkable transformations fuelled by new market by examining language and aesthetics of advertisement, rise of middle- and upper-class anxieties, and profound changes in gender expectations.