Designed for survey courses in the field A History of Medicine presents a wide-ranging overview for those seeking a solid grounding in the medical history of Western and non-Western cultures. Invaluable to instructors promoting the history of medicine in pre-professional training, and stressing major themes in the history of medicine, this third edition continues to stimulate further exploration of the events, methodologies, and theories that have shaped medical practices in decades past and continue to do so today.

In this paper we examine the validity of using one-year-ahead cash flows prediction tests as a substitute for the value relevance test of earnings. We show theoretically that the R2 of the cash flows prediction regression is contaminated by the presence of (1) noise in the cash flows and (2) spurious, i.e., value-unrelated, correlation between one-year-ahead cash flows and current earnings. We test if either of the above two factors contribute to the result of Kim and Kross (2005) that the ability of earnings to predict one-year-ahead cash flows has increased over the recent decades, in contrast to the evidence of decreasing value relevance of earnings. We find empirical evidence that both factors contributed to their result and conclude that the cash flows prediction test is a poor substitute for the value relevance test of earnings.

This paper introduces a model in which the firm's returns depend on trading volume when the firm defers disclosure, because market-makers use volume to draw inferences about better-informed investors' private information on firm value. In addition, we show that a firm's committing to a policy of timely disclosure of a broader range of outcomes dampens the slope coefficient on volume in a Taylor expansion of the log of the absolute value of returns on volume. The reason for this is that when a firm commits to a policy of timely disclosure of a broader range of outcomes, the deferral of a report indicates that the outcome is extreme. This heightens adverse selection. In turn, this makes informed trade more costly and hence less likely, thereby rendering returns less dependent on trading volume as a source of information about firm value. This result predicts that firms committing to more disclosure should experience a smaller slope coefficient on trading volume. Thus, the slope coefficient offers a potential tool for measuring the economic consequences of shifts in disclosure regimes.

"Proposes an approach to link customer value to shareholder value by measuring how sales changes are translated into earnings changes and ultimately into changes in earnings capitalization or share price."--

We evaluate the ability of the mean analyst forecast to effectively summarize analysts' information. We show analytically that even if analysts possess the ability and intention to forecast earnings truthfully, the mean forecast underweights analysts' private information. Thus, the mean does not adequately aggregate the full set of information individual analysts use in making their forecasts. Since the mean underweights private information, the problem worsens as the number of analysts forecasting earnings increases. We show that a positive multiple of forecast revision can be used to reduce the impact of improper information aggregation. We show empirically that forecast errors are positively related to forecast revision, and this relation is increasing in the number of forecasts made. Our results have implications for researchers who use the mean analyst forecast to proxy for the market's expectations of earnings.