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Patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) often require inpatient palliative care (IPC). However, mounting evidence suggests age-related disparities in palliative care delivery. This study aimed to assess the cumulative incidence function (CIF) of IPC delivery, as well as the influence of age.The national ESME (Epidemio-Strategy-Medical-Economical)-MBC cohort includes consecutive MBC patients treated in 18 French Comprehensive Cancer Centres. ICD-10 palliative care coding was used for IPC identification.Our analysis included 12,375 patients, 5093 (41.2%) of whom were aged 65 or over. The median follow-up was 41.5 months (95% confidence interval [CI], 40.5-42.5). The CIF of IPC was 10.3% (95% CI, 10.2-10.4) and 24.8% (95% CI, 24.7-24.8) at 2 and 8 years, respectively. At 2 years, among triple-negative patients, young patients (65 yo) had a higher CIF of IPC than older patients after adjusting for cancer characteristics, centre and period (65+/65: β = -0.05; 95% CI, -0.08 to -0.01). Among other tumour sub-types, older patients received short-term IPC more frequently than young patients (65+/65: β = 0.02; 95% CI, 0.01 to 0.03). At 8 years, outside large centres, IPC was delivered less frequently to older patients adjusted to cancer characteristics and period (65+/65: β = -0.03; 95% CI, -0.06 to -0.01).We found a relatively low CIF of IPC and that age influenced IPC delivery. Young triple-negative and older non-triple-negative patients needed more short-term IPCs. Older patients diagnosed outside large centres received less long-term IPC. These findings highlight the need for a wider implementation of IPC facilities and for more age-specific interventions.

Using two new comparative data sets from France, we present the first study of the compared productivity of labor-managed and conventional firms based on large representative samples of firms in a range of industries including services. We offer new stylized facts on labor-managed firms, and our approach allows us to disentangle incentive effects from those of differences in input demand behavior on factor elasticities. Contrary to received wisdom, labor-managed firms are neither smaller nor always less capital-intensive than conventional firms and grow as fast or faster in all industries. The two groups of firms organize production differently, and labor-managed firms are at least as productive as conventional ones. Labor-managed firms use their inputs efficiently, whereas in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average both groups of firms would produce the same output or more using the labor-managed firms' industry-specific technologies than they would using conventional firms'. We do not find labor-managed firms to produce at inefficiently low scale in any industry.

English health policy has promoted the diversity of providers of health care to NHS patients in recent years. Little research has been done to map the extent of actual and possible supply. Using data from four local health economies England the authors found that there was a low supply of such organisations, but that it is growing. Despite the greater emphasis placed by policy makers and researchers on non-profits, there were substantially more for-profits. This suggests they should be subject to further scrutiny, as the pressure to increase diversity of supply increases under the Coalition government.

We present new comparable data on the incidence of performance pay schemes in Europe and the USA. We find that the percentage of employees exposed to incentive pay schemes ranges from around 10-15 percent in some European countries to over 40 percent in Scandinavian countries and the US. Individual pay and profit/gain sharing schemes are widely diffused, whereas share ownership schemes are much less common, particularly in Europe. We document a number of empirical regularities. Incentive pay is less common in countries with a higher share of small firms. Higher product and labour market regulation are associated with lower use of incentive pay. Capital market development is a necessary requirement for a wider diffusion of incentive pay, particularly sharing and ownership schemes. When we control for a large set of individual characteristics and company attributes, we find that the probability that a worker is covered by an incentive scheme is higher in large firms and in high-skilled occupations, while it is much lower for females.

Despite a continuing interest in the compared efficiency of labor-managed and conventional firms, only a handful of comparative empirical studies exist. These studies suggest that labor-managed firms have the same productivity levels as conventional ones, but organize production differently. However, the data used in these studies cover a single industry, or firms matched by industry and size in manufacturing, and concern a few dozen firms. In addition, the use of constant-elasticity production functions in past studies has made it difficult to distinguish the effects of incentives embodied in the factors of production from those of scale differences that could be caused by the differences in factor demand behavior between conventional and labor-managed firms hypothesized by economic theory. The paper compares the productivity of labor-managed and conventional firms using two new panel data sets covering several thousand firms from France, including representative samples of conventional firms and all worker cooperatives with 20 employees or more in manufacturing and services. We present Generalized Least Squares (GLS) and Generalized Moments Method (GMM) estimations of translog production functions industry by industry for cooperative and conventional firms and test for the equality of their total factor productivities. We also allow systematic differences in scale and technology to be determined by the ownership form. The translog specification, which allows returns to scale to vary with input levels, makes it possible to disentangle embodied incentive effects from systematic differences in scale due to underinvestment in labor-managed firms. In the process, we also propose updated "stylized facts" about labor-managed firms in comparison with conventional firms. Our production function estimates suggest that cooperatives are at least as productive as conventional firms. However, the two types of firms organize production differently. Cooperatives are more X-efficient, i.e., they use their capital and labour more effectively, than conventional firms. With their current levels of inputs, cooperatives produce at least as much with the technology they have chosen as they would if they were using conventional firms' technology. In contrast, in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current inputs if they were organizing production as cooperatives do. In all industries and in both data sets, both types of firms would produce at constant or decreasing returns to scale if they were using the same technology at their current input levels, and we find no evidence that returns to scale are systematically higher in cooperatives. Contrary to received wisdom, descriptive statistics indicate that workers' cooperatives are not always smaller or less capitalized than conventional firms, and grow at least as fast as conventional firms in all the industries studied.