Word: economisters
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Meredith Rosenthal, a Harvard health economist, published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005 also finding that medical care improves under pay-for-performance projects. But while Rosenthal strongly supports such initiatives, she says it's imperative that they're designed properly. For example, she notes that most programs reward health providers for being the top performers in a particular field - but not for relative improvement. "Right now we're offering bonuses to A+ performers, when most doctors are delivering at a B-minus level," Rosenthal says. "Without an incentive to [improve], most doctors...
...lack of increase in wages from 2007 to 2008 may also be cause for concern for graduates, said Harvard economist Lawrence F. Katz, who has studied student career choices. Wages typically grow between 4 to 5 percent each year, Katz said...
Iceland gets some support for its conspiracy theory from Richard Portes, an economist at the London Business School. In March, after he published a favorable report on Iceland's economy, Portes says a senior figure at a major hedge fund phoned him. "He spent half an hour trying to tell me the Icelandic banks were in terrible shape and that the country was a disaster area," he recalls. "Apparently I was risking my reputation by saying anything different." But not everyone responds to Iceland's plight with sympathy. Eileen Zhang, an Iceland expert at ratings agency Standard and Poor...
...government officials have emphasized their economy's unflagging strengths in a charm offensive directed at ratings agencies and investors. Iceland is the fifth richest country in the oecd; the prices of its largest exports, aluminum and fish, are at record highs. "The Icelanders are richer than us," says British economist Portes. "They're not exactly going to starve." (Iceland's gross national income per capita is $39,400, compared to the U.K.'s $35,300.) What's more, the banks remain fundamentally sound: they have strong deposit ratios and are more profitable than their Nordic peers. First-quarter results suggest...
...banks flatly dismiss the notion that the central bank will need to bail out the system. "That's just unthinkable," says Ásgeir Jónsson, chief economist at Kaupthing, Iceland's largest bank. Following the 2006 crisis, banks greatly strengthened their liquidity positions and shifted their liabilities further into the future: on average, newly issued bonds now mature in 2010 or after, rather than within a year. Although Iceland's major banks had hoped to grow quite quickly this year, they will use their liquidity conservatively as a buffer instead. Meanwhile, to their relief, Iceland's banks have negligible...