Municipal Government Benefits Practices and Personnel Outcomes: Results from a National Survey
Employee benefits are an essential and costly component of the compensation and human resources management system. This research effort surveyed 358 municipal governments on their employee benefits practices. The survey results clearly indicate that municipal governments are very competitive in terms of traditional benefits (health, pensions, dental coverage, etc.) as all 10 types, except for short-term disability, are provided by a majority of the responding municipalities and exceed private sector rates. Municipal governments lag behind the private sector in the deployment of key family-friendly benefits such as child-care, elder care, flexi-place, flex-time and job sharing.
Managed health care plans in Southern United States municipalities: empirical evidence on choice of plan.
This study examines factors that influence choice of Southern municipal government health care plans in the United States. Using survey data, this article specifically examines the managed care offerings of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO), Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO) and Point of Service (POS) plans. Some of the more interesting empirical results indicate that HMO plans are associated more with employee satisfaction; PPO plans are associated with cost containment; and POS plans are more likely to provide health care benefits to part-time employees. Empirical evidence also indicates that employee satisfaction is increased when there is a greater choice of managed care plans available to municipal governments.
Fungal Biotransformations in Pharmaceutical Sciences
The regio- and stereoselective conversion of complex substrates represents one of the major advantage of microbial biotransformation. This chapter covers the biocatalytic capacities of fungi to derivatize bioactive small molecules, both from natural sources and from synthetic compounds. We focus particularly on sterol and taxane biotransformation. We also present examples at the interface of biotransformation and pathway engineering using recombinant organisms, with an emphasis on the production of lovastatin derivatives. Finally, we highlight selected studies on fungal xenometabolism which serves as a model to study the breakdown of drugs in mammals.