How working from home reshapes cities.

In recent decades, economic activity has become increasingly concentrated in major global metropolises. Yet, the rise of working from home threatens this dominance of cities. Using multiple high-frequency datasets on spending, commuting, migration, and housing, we provide global evidence that remote work has dispersed economic activity away from city centers.

Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance.

Working from home has become standard for employees with a university degree. The most common scheme, which has been adopted by around 100 million employees in Europe and North America, is a hybrid schedule, in which individuals spend a mix of days at home and at work each week. However, the effects of hybrid working on employees and firms have been debated, and some executives argue that it damages productivity, innovation and career development.

Income dynamics in the United Kingdom and the impact of the Covid-19 recession.

In this paper, we use an employer-based survey of earnings and hours to set out the key patterns in UK earnings dynamics from 1975 to 2020, with a particular focus on the most recent recession. We demonstrate that (log) earnings changes exhibit strongly procyclical skewness and have become increasingly leptokurtic, and thus less well approximated by a log-normal distribution, over the period of study. This holds across genders and sectors.

Medical disputes and patient satisfaction in China: How does hospital management matter?

Objective: Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfaction and hospital management as well as the role of good management in preventing medical disputes ex ante.

Method: We investigate this relationship using information on management practices collected from 510 hospitals in mainland China using the World Management Survey questionnaire and combined with medical malpractice litigation data and patient/staff satisfaction surveys.

Economic uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the US and UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based policy uncertainty, Twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective uncertainty about business growth, forecaster disagreement about future GDP growth, and a model-based measure of macro uncertainty. Four results emerge. First, all indicators show huge uncertainty jumps in reaction to the pandemic and its economic fallout.

Evaluating the Feasibility and Acceptability of a Telehealth Program in a Rural Palliative Care Population: TapCloud for Palliative Care.

Context: The impact of telehealth and remote patient monitoring has not been well established in palliative care populations in rural communities.

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to 1) describe a telehealth palliative care program using the TapCloud remote patient monitoring application and videoconferencing; 2) evaluate the feasibility, usability, and acceptability of a telehealth system in palliative care; and 3) use a quality data assessment collection tool in addition to TapCloud ratings of symptom burden and hospice transitions.

Methods: A mixed-methods approach was used to assess feasibility, usability, and acceptability.

Hospital board and management practices are strongly related to hospital performance on clinical quality metrics.

National policies to improve health care quality have largely focused on clinical provider outcomes and, more recently, payment reform. Yet the association between hospital leadership and quality, although crucial to driving quality improvement, has not been explored in depth. We collected data from surveys of nationally representative groups of hospitals in the United States and England to examine the relationships among hospital boards, management practices of front-line managers, and the quality of care delivered.

Does management really work?

HBR's 90th anniversary is a sensible time to revisit a basic question: Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices? The answer may seem obvious to most HBR readers, but these three economists cast their net much wider than that. In a decadelong study of thousands of organizations in 20 countries, they and their interview teams assessed how well manufacturers, schools, and hospitals adhere to three management basics: targets, incentives, and monitoring. They found that huge numbers of companies follow none of those fundamentals, that adopting the basics yields big improvements in outcomes such as productivity and longevity, and that good nuts-and-bolts management at individual firms shapes national performance.

Evaluation of potential for mercury volatilization from natural and FGD gypsum products using flux-chamber tests.

Synthetic gypsum produced by flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) in coal-fired power plants (FGD gypsum) is put to productive use in manufacturing wallboard. FGD gypsum wallboard is widely used, accounting for nearly 30% of wallboard sold in the United States. Mercury is captured in flue gas and thus is one of the trace metals present in FGD gypsum; raising questions about the potential for mercury exposure from wallboard.