With interest rates on fixed income investments hovering near historic lows, a growing cadre of retirement researchers has been sounding alarm bells regarding the unprecedented portfolio risk faced by consumers who are approaching retirement or recently retired. Their message is simple,...

DESPITE THEIR DIFFERENT TRADITIONS, THE WORKS COUNCIL IS common to all nine countries. Basically works councils are consultative committees composed of workers' and management's representatives, with the important exception of Germany, where they are exclusively employee bodies. However, they...

Let Un be a second-degree, nondegenerate, zero mean U-statistic with a bounded kernel, scaled so that Un/[radical sign]n => N(0, [sigma]2). Large deviation approximations are developed for tail probabilities P(Un > x[radical sign]n) using a new explicit tilting procedure.

We obtain a saddlepoint approximation for the Studentized mean of a simple random sample taken without replacement from a finite population. This is only possible if we know the entire population, so we also obtain an empirical saddlepoint approximation based on the sample alone. This empirical...

We consider tests or confidence intervals on one of the components of multivariate M-estimates. We obtain marginal tail area approximations for the one-dimensional test statistic based on the appropriate component of the M-estimate for both standardized and Studentized versions. The result is...

Procedures for analyzing and comparing healthcare providers' effects on health services delivery and outcomes have been referred to as provider profiling. In a typical profiling procedure, patient-level responses are measured for clusters of patients treated by providers that in turn, can be...

Objective. To examine effects of primary care physicians (PCPs) and patients on the association between charges for primary care and specialty care in a point-of-service (POS) health plan.Data Source. Claims from 1996 for 3,308 adult male POS plan members, each of whom was assigned to one of the...