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Whether compensation serves as a motivational resource for employees is still a debated subject. It has been suggested that the effect of pay on motivation could be contingent on the satisfaction of the basic psychological needs as outlined by self-determination theory. The current research explored the role of amount of base pay as well as pay fairness discrepancy in relation to basic psychological need satisfaction, autonomous work motivation and, in turn, psychological well-being (i.e., vigor and emotional exhaustion), turnover intentions, and work performance. Managerial need support was also included in the model, so its mechanisms and its effects on the outcomes could be measured against those of pay. Using a combination of archival data and employees' self-reports from 593 Norwegian workers, results revealed that amount of base pay did not predict satisfaction of any of the basic needs, pay fairness discrepancy negatively predicted satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and relatedness and positively predicted satisfaction of the need for competence, whereas managerial need support significantly predicted satisfaction of all three needs. While there was no significant direct relation from amount of base pay to any of the outcomes, results showed a significant direct relation from managerial need support to psychological well-being (positive to vigor and negative to emotional exhaustion) and turnover intentions (negative). There was also a significant direct positive relation from pay fairness discrepancy to turnover intentions., (© 2024 The Author(s). Scandinavian Journal of Psychology published by Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Background: The aim was to estimate direct medical costs of men and women patients by age group related to cardiovascular diseases (coronary heart disease, strokes) in the province of Quebec, Canada from the economic perspective of the healthcare public system, encompassing five cost components: physician fees, hospitalization (hospital stay, intensive care stay), emergency visits and medication costs., Methods: This matched case-control study involved secondary data from a longitudinal cohort study (1997-2018) of 4584 white-collar workers. Participants were followed for a four-year period. We used an incremental cost method of difference-in-difference. Descriptive analyses using frequency counts, arithmetic means, standardized differences, chi-squared tests, and Student's T-tests were performed. Direct medical costs were estimated using mean and 95% bootstrap confidence interval., Results: Direct medical costs per case were CAD $4970 [4344, 5595] for all in the first year after the event. For men patients, direct medical costs were $5351 [4649, 6053] and $4234 [2880, 5588] for women in the first year after the event, $221 [-229, 671] for men and $226 [-727, 1179] for women in the second year, and $11 [-356, 377] for men and $-24 [-612, 564] for women in the third year. This decrease was observed for both men and women, with higher costs for men. Within the first year, physician fees dominated CVD-associated costs among both men and women cases younger than 65. However, hospital stay represented the costliest component among cases aged 65 and older, incurring higher costs in women compared to men. In the subsequent years, the distribution of costs showed variations according to sex and age, with either medication costs or physician fees being the predominant components, depending on the specific subgroups., Conclusions: CVD-associated direct medical costs varied by components, sex, age, and follow-up years. Patients with CVD incurred more than twice the medical costs as compared to patients without CVD of same age and sex., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Gilbert-Ouimet et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Objectives: The literature is nonexistent on the assessment of overall fractions of diseases attributable to multiple dependent psychosocial work factors. The objectives of the study were to calculate the overall fractions of coronary heart diseases (CHD) and depression attributable to multiple dependent psychosocial work factors in 35 European countries., Methods: We used already published fractions of CHD and depression attributable to each of the following psychosocial work factors: job strain, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, long working hours, and workplace bullying. We took all exposures and their correlations into account to calculate overall attributable fractions. Wald tests were performed to test differences in these overall attributable fractions between genders and between countries., Results: The overall fractions of CHD and depression attributable to all studied psychosocial work factors together were found to be 8.1% [95% CI: 2.0-13.9] and 26.3% [95% CI: 16.2-35.5] respectively in the 35 European countries. There was no difference between genders and between countries., Conclusion: Our study showed that the overall fractions attributable to all studied psychosocial work factors were substantial especially for depression. These overall attributable fractions may be particularly useful to evaluate the burden and costs attributable to psychosocial work factors, and also to inform policies makers at European level., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

This paper studies the optimal fiscal treatment of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in an economy where individuals differ in their reproductive capacity (or fecundity) and in their wage. We find that the optimal ART tax policy varies with the postulated social welfare criterion. Utilitarianism redistributes only between individuals with unequal fecundity and wages but not between parents and childless individuals. To the opposite, ex post egalitarianism (which gives absolute priority to the worst-off in realized terms) redistributes from individuals with children toward those without children, and from individuals with high fecundity toward those with low fecundity, so as to compensate for both the monetary cost of ART and the disutility from involuntary childlessness resulting from unsuccessful ART investments. Under asymmetric information and in order to solve for the incentive problem, utilitarianism recommends to either tax or subsidize ART investments of low-fecundity-low-productivity individuals at the margin, depending on the degree of complementarity between fecundity and ART in the fertility technology. On the opposite, ex post egalitarianism always recommends marginal taxation of ART., (© 2024 The Authors. Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Background: Positive psychology focuses on enhancing attitudes and behaviors that support well-being, with a key pillar being the use of psychological strengths for optimal functioning. This is linked to positive outcomes such as increased happiness and life satisfaction., Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric validity of the French adaptation of the Strengths Use Scale (SUS), a self-report tool measuring how individuals use their strengths in daily life. The original SUS, developed by Govindji and Linley (2007), has not been thoroughly assessed across languages and cultures., Method: The French SUS's psychometric properties were examined using data from six independent French-speaking Canadian samples ( N = 1397). After removing cases with missing data, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on a subsample to establish the optimal factor structure. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was then performed to assess the factor structure's goodness-of-fit., Results: Both EFA and CFA supported a unidimensional structure of the scale. The French SUS demonstrated good internal consistency (α = .94). The one-factor model yielded an RMSEA of .122, indicating some model misspecification. However, allowing residuals of some items to covary improved the model fit (RMSEA = .077)., Conclusion: The adapted French SUS exhibits similar properties to the original and presents no new consistency issues. This study contributes to adapting and validating the SUS in French for research and clinical practice. Future research should focus on developing a shorter version by eliminating redundancies and adapting the scale for children to evaluate positive psychology interventions' efficacy in youth., Competing Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

COVID-19 outbreaks at nursing homes during the recent pandemic have received ample media coverage and may have lasting negative impacts on individuals' perception of nursing homes. We argue that this could have sizable and persistent implications for savings and long-term care policies. Our theoretical model predicts that higher nursing home aversion should induce higher savings and stronger support for policies subsidizing home care. Based on a survey of Canadians aged 50 to 69, we document that higher nursing home aversion is widespread: 72% of respondents are less inclined to enter a nursing home because of the pandemic. Consistent with our model, we find that these respondents are more likely to have higher intended savings for old age because of the pandemic. We also find that they are more likely to strongly support home care subsidies., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Background: This study aimed to estimate the annual burden of cardiovascular diseases and depression attributable to five psychosocial work exposures in 28 European Union countries (EU28) in 2015., Methods: Based on available attributable fraction estimates, the study covered five exposures, job strain, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, long working hours and workplace bullying; and five outcomes, coronary/ischemic heart diseases (CHD), stroke, atrial fibrillation, peripheral artery disease and depression. We estimated the burden attributable to each exposure separately and all exposures together. We calculated Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) rate per 100 000 workers in each country for each outcome attributable to each exposure and tested the differences between countries and between genders using the Wald test., Results: The overall burden of CHD attributable to the five studied psychosocial work exposures together was estimated at 173 629 DALYs for men and 39 238 for women, 5092 deaths for men and 1098 for women in EU28 in 2015. The overall burden of depression was estimated at 528 549 DALYs for men and 344 151 for women (respectively 7862 and 1823 deaths). The three highest burdens in DALYs in EU28 in 2015 were found for depression attributable to job strain (546 502 DALYs), job insecurity (294 680 DALYs) and workplace bullying (276 337 DALYs). Significant differences between countries were observed for DALY rates per 100 000 workers., Conclusions: Such results are necessary as decision tools for decision-makers (governments, employers and trade unions) when defining public health priorities and work stress preventive strategies in Europe., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Public Health Association.)

We investigated, based on self-determination theory (SDT), the impact of the functional meaning of monetary rewards on individuals' motivation and performance and further tested the role of the psychological needs as the underlying mechanism. In two experimental studies, we show that when presented in an autonomy-supportive way, rewards lead participants to experience greater intrinsic motivation, which leads them to perform better, than when monetary rewards are presented in a controlling way. This is mediated by greater psychological need satisfaction, indicating that through greater feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, individuals experience greater intrinsic motivation for the task at hand. Our findings suggest that rewards can have a distinct effect on individuals' motivation and performance depending on whether they take on an autonomy-supportive or controlling meaning, thus providing empirical evidence for the theoretical and practical implications of SDT's concept of functional meaning of rewards. By highlighting the importance of this concept, this research contributes to our understanding of the effectiveness of such rewards in the workplace, suggesting that they can foster employee motivation and performance if organisations present them to employees in an autonomy-supportive way to convey an informational meaning and positively contribute to their psychological need stisfaction., (© 2019 International Union of Psychological Science.)

We investigate conditional specifications of the five-factor Fama-French (FF) model, augmented with traditional illiquidity measures. The motivation for this time-varying methodology is that the traditional static approach of the FF model may be misspecified, especially for the endogenous illiquidity measures. We focus on the time-varying nature of the Jensen performance measure α and the market systematic risk sensitivity β, as these parameters are essentially universal in asset pricing models. To tackle endogeneity and other specification errors, we rely on our robust instrumental variables (RIV) algorithm implemented via a GMM approach. In this dynamic or time-varying conditional context, we generally find that the most significant factor is the market one, but illiquidity may matter depending on which states or estimation methods we consider. In particular, sectors whose returns embed a market illiquidity premium are more exposed to a binding funding constraint in times of crisis, which leads to deleveraging and a resulting decrease in systematic risk., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The diffusion of the Web 2.0 has made it possible for patients to exchange on online health communities, defined as computer-mediated communities dedicated to health topics, wherein members can build relationships with other members. It is now acknowledged that online health communities provide users not only with medical information but also with social support with no time or geographical boundaries. However, in spite of their considerable interest, there is still a paucity of research as to how online health communities alter the patient-physician relationship. This research aims at filling this gap and examines how online health communities, while providing users with computer-mediated social support and empowerment, impact the patient-physician relationship. Six hypotheses are proposed and tested. A survey was developed and 328 responses were collected from online patient groups in Canada in 2016. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling. All but one hypothesis are validated. The results show that user computer-mediated social support positively influences user empowerment and participation during the consultation, which in turn determines user commitment to the relationship with the physician. Importantly and contrary to our expectations, user empowerment is found to be significantly but negatively related to user commitment with the physician.