dealing with cultural differences in environmental management exploring the cep cfp relationship abstract despite numerous attempts to agree on the nature of the relationship between environmental and financial performance controversial results still exist in the literature this discrepancy suggests that we must enlarge the spectrum of analysis to understand when it pays to be green the way in which society takes a stance on environmental responsibility is deeply bounded to the cultural lenses through which it sets its priorities a cultural perspective can help explain the capacity for social phenomena to shape behaviour we consider how the contextual environment of culture thus far neglected might moderate the corporate environmental performance corporate financial performance relationship and thus influence firms capacity to offset the costs of environmental management by using a sample of 954 companies we contribute to the long running debate showing how the effect of cultural influence can overcome the hurdle of contrasting results and offer novel insights for both academia and practitioners

male and female marriage returns to schooling a collective marriage matching model is estimated and calibrated to quantify the share of returns to schooling that is realized through marriage the predictions of the model are matched with detailed danish household data on the relationship between schooling and wage rates the division of time and goods within the household and the extent to which men and women sort positively on several traits in marriage counterfactual analysis conducted with the model suggests that danish men and women are earning on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes

an economic theory of self control the concept of self control is incorporated in a theory of individual intertemporal choice by modeling the individual as an organization the individual at a point in time is assumed to be both a farsighted planner and a myopic doer the resulting conflict is seen to be fundamentally similar to the agency conflict between the owners and managers of a firm both individuals and firms use the same techniques to mitigate the problems which the conflicts create this paper stresses the implications of this agency model and discusses as applications the effect of pensions on saving saving and the timing of income flows and individual discount rates

board composition and financial performance uncovering the effects of diversity in an emerging economy we examine the key elements of board diversity or heterogeneity amongst listed companies operating in an emerging economy mauritius and the extent to which these influence financial performance specifically we ask whether there is evidence of tangible benefits in pursuing a strategy of board diversity in terms of gender age educational background and independence in a corporate context which has long been dominated by family led and closed boardrooms in light of recent corporate governance developments which appear to foster greater diversity we examine data from the 2007 annual reports of all 42 companies listed on the stock exchange of mauritius we find that i women remain poorly represented on boards ii there is a relatively satisfactory level of heterogeneity in terms of educational background age and independence in relation to developed countries we also find significant regression coefficients for all four variables in terms of their impact on short term performance however these relationships are characterised by both negative and positive impacts thereby leading to discussions on the validity of a strict heterogeneous or homogeneous board composition in the context of a developing economy

board size and diversity as governance mechanisms in community development loan funds in the usa community development loan funds cdlfs in the us help revitalize low income communities by providing financial services to underserved populations this article uses recently available data from several surveys to explore the link between performance and board size and diversity given the unique nature of cdlfs specific hypotheses are formulated based on insights from the literature on governance in banks and nonprofit institutions to capture the cdlfs multiple objectives the article adapts an empirical approach used to study governance in banks the results show that efficiency improves as the board size increases up to 13 members the results also suggest that gender diversity has a positive impact while racial diversity is associated with a negative but negligibly small impact

education and income attraction an online dating field experiment abstractprior studies have found a robust correlation in the education of dating and married couples however there is little evidence to suggest that such correlations are causal that is for the sake of relationship public goods such as the pleasures of the enlightened conversations that only a common high level of education might support being empirical studies they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income height or health which are correlated with education from driving results we contribute to this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 388 artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in china we then counted thousands of visits clicks on abbreviated profiles which included education and income information from search engine results we found that men s visits to female profiles were unaffected by the profile s assigned education level while women s visits to male profiles increase with the prof

women directors on corporate boards from tokenism to critical mass academic debate on the strategic importance of women corporate directors is widely recognized and still open however most corporate boards have only one woman director or a small minority of women directors therefore they can still be considered as tokens this article addresses the following question does an increased number of women corporate boards result in a build up of critical mass that substantially contributes to firm innovation the aim is to test if at least three women could constitute the desired critical mass by identifying different minorities of women directors one woman two women and at least three women tests are conducted on a sample of 317 norwegian firms the results suggest that attaining critical mass going from one or two women a few tokens to at least three women consistent minority makes it possible to enhance the level of firm innovation moreover the results show that the relationship between the critical mass of women directors and the level of firm innovation is mediated by board strategic tasks implications for both theory and practice and future research directions are discussed

ceo characteristics and firm r d spending over the past fifteen years a number of studies have examined the determinants of firm r d spending these studies however almost invariably focus on the role of firm or external ownership characteristics in predicting r d spending while overlooking the attributes of the top managers involved in allocating corporate resources in this study we change that focus by empirically examining how r d spending as compared to industry competitors varies at firms based on the characteristics of their ceos using a sample of publicly traded firms we find that ceo characteristics explain a significant proportion of the sample variance in firm r d spending even when corporate strategy ownership structure and other firm level attributes are controlled in terms of individual ceo characteristics we find that r d spending is greater at firms where ceos are younger have greater wealth invested in firm stock and signifacant career experience in marketing and or engineering r d in contrast to existing theory we find that the amount of a ceo s formal education had no significant association with r d spending once a ceo has attained a college degree however significant r d spending increases are found at firms where ceos have advanced science related degrees from subgroup analyses we further find that ceo effects on relative r d spending increase with longer ceo tenure implying that ceos over time may mold r d spending to suit their own preferences from these results we make implications for both research on determinants of r d spending and managerial practice

women on the board and managers pay evidence from spain the current literature shows great interest in the issue of gender diversity on boards of directors some studies have hypothesized a direct relationship between diversity and the value of the firm but not many examine the intermediate mechanisms that may exert an influence on such relationships we employ two stages of gmm estimation methodology to exhibit evidences of the relationship between gender diversity and compensation of top managers in the spanish context results show that gender diversity positively affects the effectiveness of boards in terms of composition structure size and functioning influencing a proper design of top managers compensation linked to company performance evidences suggest that legislative actions aimed at increasing the presence of women on boards of directors are justified not only for ethical reasons but also for reasons of economic efficiency

management ownership and market valuation an empirical analysis we investigate the relationship between management ownership and market valuation of the firm as measured by tobin s q in a 1980 cross section of 371 fortune 500 firms we find evidence of a significant nonmonotonic relationship tobin s q first increases then declines and finally rises slightly as ownership by the board of directors rises for older firms there is evidence that q is lower when the firm is run by a member of the founding family than when it is run by an officer unrelated to the founder

the carnegie conjecture some empirical evidence this paper examines tax return generated data on the labor force behavior of people before and after they receive inheritances the results are consistent with andrew carnegie s century old assertion that large inheritances decrease a person s labor force participation for example a single person who receives an inheritance of about 150 000 is roughly four times more likely to leave the labor force than a person with an inheritance below 25 000 additional albeit weaker evidence suggests that large inheritances depress labor supply even when participation is unaltered warren kendall heir to an insurance company fortune says he s worth about 5 million and has an income of about oh 300 and some thousand a year h e has never held a job or wanted to going down to sea in cruise ships is his full time pursuit he estimates that he has taken about 250 cruises over the past couple of decades spending at least 50 percent to 70 percent of the year afloat morgenthaler 1991 p al

agency relationships in family firms theory and evidence does owner management necessarily eliminate the agency costs of ownership drawing on agency literature and on the economic theory of the household we argue that private ownership and owner management expose privately held owner managed firms to agency threats ignored by jensen s and meckling s 1976 agency model private ownership and owner management not only reduce the effectiveness of external control mechanisms they also expose firms to a self control problem created by incentives that cause owners to take actions which harm themselves as well as those around them jensen 1994 p 43 thus shareholders have incentive to invest resources in curbing both managerialand owner opportunism we extend this thesis to the domain of the family firm after developing hypotheses which describe how family dynamics and specifically altruism exacerbate agency problems experienced by these privately held owner managed firms we use data obtained from a large scale survey of family businesses to field test our hypotheses and find evidence which suggests support for our proposed theory finally we discuss the implications of our theory for research on family and other types of privately held owner managed firms

marriage and consumption insurance what s love got to do with it when markets are incomplete individuals may choose to marry to diversify their labor income risk love however can complicate the picture if love is fleeting or the resolution of agents income uncertainty occurs predominantly later in life then marriages with good economic matches last longer in contrast if love is persistent and the resolution of uncertainty to agents income occurs early then marriages with good economic matches are more likely to be caught short with too little love to save a marriage consequently once married the partners will be more likely to divorce evidence is provided to distinguish between these alternative scenarios

gender wage inequality in inclusive and exclusive industrial relations systems a comparison of argentina and chile drawing on an empirical and comparative mixed methods analysis of argentina and chile this article investigates arguments about the role of inclusive versus exclusive industrial relations systems in promoting gender wage equity and enabling attractive wage returns to women investing in higher education our findings confirm the importance of argentina s inclusive industrial relations system in narrowing gender pay differences to a greater extent than chile nevertheless chile s industrial relations institutions are not wholly exclusive its high level statutory minimum wage has played a strongly distributive role in the 2000s and compressed wages in the lower half of the wage distribution also notable is the finding from quantile regression that highly educated women in high paid jobs enjoy a larger wage premium in the class equal argentina than in chile despite a far wider wage gap between low high educated workers in chile overall

gender diversity in the boardroom and firm performance what exactly constitutes a critical mass the under representation of women on boards is a heavily discussed topic not only in germany based on critical mass theory and with the help of a hand collected panel dataset of 151 listed german firms for the years 2000 2005 we explore whether the link between gender diversity and firm performance follows a u shape controlling for reversed causality we find evidence for gender diversity to at first negatively affect firm performance and only after a critical mass of about 30 women has been reached to be associated with higher firm performance than completely male boards given our sample firms the critical mass of 30 women translates into an absolute number of about three women on the board and hence supports recent studies on a corresponding magic number of women in the boardroom

do regulated microfinance institutions achieve better sustainability and outreach cross country evidence in spite of increasing pressure on microfinance institutions mfis operating in developing countries to transform into regulated financial intermediaries to date no study has investigated whether regulated mfis actually achieve better financial results and reach more poor clients than nonregulated mfis this article explores the impact of regulation on mfi performance using newly released data for 114 mfis from 62 countries in an empirical model where performance is specified as a function of mfi specific regulatory macroeconomic and institutional variables consistent with recent cross country evidence on the impact of banking regulations on bank performance barth et al 2004 this article finds that regulatory involvement does not directly affect performance either in terms of operational self sustainability or outreach the article also finds that less leveraged mfis have better sustainability the policy implication is that mfis transformation into regulated financial institutions is may not

equal pay as a moving target international perspectives on forty years of addressing the gender pay gap this paper provides an overview of the key factors impacting upon the gender pay gap in the uk europe and australia forty years after the implementation of the first equal pay legislation the pay gap remains a key aspect of the inequalities women face in the labour market while the overall pay gap has tended to fall in many countries over the past forty years it has not closed in some countries it has been stubbornly resistant or has even widened in reviewing the collection of papers that make up this special issue we identify four broad themes with which to group the contributions and draw out the explanations for diverse trends theoretical and conceptual debates legal developments and their impacts wage setting institutions and changing employer demands and newly emerging pay inequalities between and within educational and ethnic groups across the four themes we underline how the trends in the gender pay gap capture the dynamism of inequalities as the market power of different groups and stakeholders changes over times three key dimensions emerge from the papers to provide a framework for future research and policy discourse the relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies the interaction between wage setting institutions and new organisational practices and the increasing and range of diversity or equality strands competing for equal treatment we conclude that progress towards closing the gender pay gap will not be easy will require a collective effort of various actors and will not be quick

the family as an incomplete annuities market families can self insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings they may simply reflect risk sharing behavior of completely selfish family members although family annuity markets are incomplete even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities given adverse selection and transaction costs family risk pooling may be preferred to public market annuities in the absence of public annuities these risk sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for marriage and family formation

schooling search and spouse selection testing economic theories of marriage and household behavior the implications of the economic theories of marriage and of household fertility behavior are tested in a framework in which educational investment marital search and marital matches are responsive to marriage market conditions and the personal traits of individual agents some of which are unobserved by the econometrician implications are also derived and tested for the effects of longevity attractiveness preferences and labor and marriage market conditions on schooling marriage age and spouse choice the empirical results indicate that inattention to heterogeneity and martial selection leads to a false rejection of the economic theory of marriage but to a false acceptance of the value of time fertility hypothesis

cohabitation marriage and divorce in a model of match quality the objective of this research is to further our understanding of how and why individuals enter and leave coresidential relationships we develop and estimate an economic model of nonmarital cohabitation marriage and divorce that is consistent with current data on the formation and dissolution of relationships jovanovic s journal of political economy 87 1979 972 90 theoretical matching model is extended to help explain household formation and dissolution behavior implications of the model reveal what factors influence the decision to start a relationship what form this relationship will take and the relative stability of the various types of unions the structural parameters of the model are estimated using longitudinal data from a sample of female high school seniors from the united states new numerical methods are developed to reduce computational costs associated with estimation the empirical results have interesting interpretations given the structural model they show that a significant cause of cohabitation is the need to learn about potential partners and to hedge against future bad shocks the estimated parameters are used to conduct several comparative dynamic experiments for example we show that policy experiments changing the cost of divorce have little effect on relationship choices

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

power in a theory of the firm transactions take place in the firm rather than in the market because the firm offers power to agents who make specific investments past literature emphasizes the allocation of ownership as the primary mechanism by which the firm does this within the contractibility assumptions of this literature we identify a potentially superior mechanism the regulation of access to critical resources access can be better than ownership because i the power agents get from access is more contingent on their making the right investment and ii ownership has adverse effects on the incentive to specialize the theory explains the importance of internal organization and third party ownership

ceo duality as a double edged sword how boards of directors balance entrenchment avoidance and unity of command when a firm s chief executive officer is also the chairperson of its board directors have opposing objectives according to organization theory such ceo duality establishes strong unambiguous le

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

the gender wage gap a comparison of australia and canada using data from the 1989 canadian labour market activity survey and for australia the 1989 90 income distribution survey the authors investigate the reasons for the significantly lower gender wage gap in australia than in canada key similarities and differences between these two countries the authors argue make them a good basis for a natural experiment to investigate the effects of different labor market institutions in particular australia has a stronger union movement and a greater degree of centralization in wage determination than canada and most of its workers are covered by legally binding minimum working conditions the authors conclude that several differences between the countries in labor market structure notably a lower rate of return to education a lower rate of return to labor market experience and a lower level of wage inequality in australia than in canada are largely responsible for the smaller gender wage gap in australia

a women s boom in the boardroom effects on performance this article analyzes whether improving gender diversity in boardrooms improves firms economic performance in the context of french cac40 listed companies between 2008 and 2012 this research uses instrumental variable panel regressions including production frontier estimates to arrive at two key results first gender diversity in boards depends on firms attributes including their previous gender promotion strategies second promoting women in boardrooms has a significant and positive effect on economic performance after accounting for the endogeneity of diversity gender diversity even reduces corporate inefficiencies and enables firms to come closer to their optimal performance

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

investment in schooling and the marriage market we present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns the labor market return resulting from higher wages and a marriagemarket return defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract men and women may have different incentives to invest in schooling because of different market wages or household roles this asymmetry can yield a mixed equilibrium with some educated individuals marrying uneducated spouses when the labor market returns to schooling rises home production demands less time and the traditional spousal labor division norms weaken more women may invest in schooling than men

wealth inequality educational environment and school enrolment evidence from mexico using data from the extended section of the 2010 mexican census 2 9 million households we study how school enrolment is associated with wealth inequality and with the educational environment the child is exposed to at the household and municipal levels we provide robust evidence of wealth inequality as a negative predictor of school enrolment for children in primary secondary and high school age ranges while a positive role is played by the educational environment through the introduction of interaction terms we account for how economic and educational variables are intertwined at both the household and the municipal level and we are able to illustrate the considerable heterogeneity in the role of adult education for households at different standards of living

measuring economies of scale and scope in agricultural banking generally empirical studies have used either duality theory with the estimation of cost functions or nonparametric estimation methods to assess efficiency in the financial services industry the purpose of the present study is to estimate economies of scope and scale in agricultural banking this will be accomplished through estimation of an indirect multi product cost function the uniqueness of this study when compared to previous studies of efficiency of the financial services industry is the disaggregation of the outputs so that agricultural lending can be evaluated in addition a normalized quadratic cost function is estimated with curvature properties imposed clark reviewed thirteen studies that measured economies of scope and scale for commercial banks credit unions and savings and loan associations he found that they offered four broad conclusions a overall economies of scale exist at low levels of input b no consistent evid nce of economies of scope exists c some evidence of cost complementarities exists and d the results seem to be robust among financial institutions

gender diversity in the boardroom and firm financial performance the monitoring role performed by the board of directors is an important corporate governance control mechanism especially in countries where external mechanisms are less well developed the gender composition of the board can affect the quality of this monitoring role and thus the financial performance of the firm this is part of the business case for female participation on boards though arguments may also be framed in terms of ethical considerations while the issue of board gender diversity has attracted growing research interest in recent years most empirical results are based on u s data this article adds to a growing number of non u s studies by investigating the link between the gender diversity of the board and firm financial performance in spain a country which historically has had minimal female participation in the workforce but which has now introduced legislation to improve equality of opportunities we investigate the topic using panel data analysis and find that gender diversity as measured by the percentage of women on the board and by the blau and shannon indices has a positive effect on firm value and that the opposite causal relationship is not significant our study suggests that investors in spain do not penalise firms which increase their female board membership and that greater gender diversity may generate economic gains

the salesperson as outside agent or employee a transaction cost analysis this descriptive study explores the reasons for integration of the personal selling function i e the use of employee direct salespeople rather than manufacturers representatives reps a hypothesized model is developed based on both transaction cost analysis and the sales force management literature data from 13 electronic component manufacturers covering 159 u s sales districts are used to estimate a logistic model of the probability of going direct in a given district results are shown to be stable across specification and estimation methods and to fit the data well the transaction cost model is generally supported the principal finding is that the greater the difficulty of evaluating a salesperson s performance the more likely the firm to substitute surveillance for commission as a control mechanism i e to use a direct sales force among other findings direct sales forces are also associated with complex hard to learn product lines and with districts that demand considerable nonselling activities several factors prove unrelated including company size the amount of travel a district requires and the importance of key accounts this article was originally published in marketing science volume 4 issue 3 pages 234 254 in 1985

managerial incentives and product market competition are imperfectly competitive leibenstein 1966 claims that there may be a substantial amount of x inefficiency where x inefficiency measures the degree to which actual profits depart from the maximum of profits that could be obtained if all operations in the firm were carried out at minimal costs he offers empirical evidence from case studies showing that the welfare loss due to organizational slack is of an order of magnitude bigger than the welfare loss due to monopolistic price distortions on imperfectly competitive markets these results support the common presumption that increasing competition reduces organizational and in particular managerial slack however this early literature does not offer a theoretical explanation for the link between competition and managerial incentives in particular it ignores the fact that managerial incentives can be affected by the design of an incentive scheme in this paper i derive the optimal incentive scheme for a manager as a function of the competitiveness of the environment in which his firm operates the basic impact of increased competition is that it reduces the profits of a firm this has two effects in the model first if a firm has high costs then the reduction of profits may be sufficient to render the firm unprofitable so the probability that it has to be liquidated goes up this unambiguously induces the manager of the firm to work harder for a cost reduction in order to avoid liquidation and to keep his job second the reduction in profits may affect

gender and the new inequality explaining the college non college wage gap the new inequality is often characterized by the increasing wage gap between workers with a college education and those without yet although the gap in hourly wages between college educated and non college educated women is high and rising the topic has been overshadowed by research on gender inequality and wage inequality among men using the 1990 5 percent public use microdata samples independent sources of macro data and controls for individual human capital characteristics i examine the association between the college non college wage gap and key aspects of local economic conditions for women and men while the college non college wage gap among women is comparable in size to the gap among men significant gender differences emerge in the underlying sources of high wage gaps in over 500 labor markets across the united states compared with men flexible and insecure employment conditions e g joblessness casualization and immigration are more important in fostering high wage gaps among women than are technology trade and industrial composition the prevailing explanations of rising wage inequality over time based on these gender differences i reconsider the debate on labor market restructuring and inequality and discuss a new analytical focus on differences in within gender inequality

do investors value a firm s commitment to social activities previous empirical research has found mixed results for the impact of corporate social responsibility csr investments on corporate financial performance cfp this paper contributes to the literature by exploring in a two stage investor decision making model the relationship between a firm s innovation effort csr and financial performance we simultaneously examine the impact of csr on both accounting based financial health and market based tobin s q financial performance measures from a sample of top corporate citizens we find that 1 a firm s social responsibility commitment csr contributes to its financial performance 2 after controlling for investment in innovation activities csr continues to have a positive impact on a firm s financial performance 3 the customer dimension of csr has a positive effect on both cfp measures whereas the employee dimension indicates a significant impact only on financial heath and 4 the community relation dimension of csr only affects the market based cfp measure of firms with high innovation intensity

a fresh look at the rotten kid theorem and other household mysteries gary becker s rotten kid theorem asserts that if all family members receive gifts of money income from a benevolent household member then even if the household head does not precommit to an incentive plan for family members it will be in the interest of selfish family members to maximize total family income i show by examples that the rotten kid theorem is not true without assuming transferable utility i find a simple condition on utility functions that is necessary and sufficient for there to be the kind of transferable utility needed for a rotten kid theorem while restrictive these conditions still allow one to apply the strong conclusions of the rotten kid theorem in an interesting class of examples

private equity investment decisions in family firms the role of human resources and agency costs abstract this study examines decision making criteria that are employed by private equity pe investors selecting family firms hypotheses test the likelihood of investment based on family firm characteristics findings show that pe professionals take into account family specific criteria including human resources and opportunities to reduce agency costs furthermore pe professionals prefer family firms that are already professionalized this research contributes to the family firm literature on both a theoretical and a methodological level exploring nonfamily succession routes and employing techniques conjoint analysis for data collection and multilevel models for data analysis that have seldom been used in this context

financial management effectiveness and board gender diversity in member governed community financial institutions although non profit organisations typically have high representation of females on their boards relatively little is known about the effects of gender diversity in these organisations particularly in relation to financial management in this archival study resource dependency theory and agency analysis are combined to provide theoretical insight and empirical analysis of gender diversity on effective financial management in member governed community financial institutions the investigation is possible due to the unique characteristics of the organisational form and region being examined credit unions in northern ireland the sector has not been subject to external regulation on board gender yet a wide array of gender mix on boards ranging from 100 male to 100 female are in existence in addition effective financial management is crucial to their survival and their ability to meet member objectives boards with higher female representation exhibit superior financial management first in respect of loan book quality in the period of austerity following the financial crisis and second when measured against return on assets

larger board size and decreasing firm value in small firms1 abstract several studies hypothesize a relation between board size and financial performance empirical tests of the relation exist in only a few studies of large u s firms we find a significant negative correlation between board size and profitability in a sample of small and midsize finnish firms finding a board size effect for a new and different class of firms affects the range of explanations for the board size effect

migration family and risk diversification this article proposes a formal model of migration in which workers are heterogeneous and markets are stochastically correlated we derive and characterize the optimal migration pattern of a family we show that migration can take place even when migrants earn less abroad and surprisingly when earnings in the foreign country are riskier for every member of the family moreover it may well be an optimal arrangement to have only dependents migrate thus rationalizing the recent dependent oriented migration flows from places like hong kong and taiwan we provide some evidence in support of our theory

marriage and the city search frictions and sorting of singles this paper develops and tests a model where cities play an important role as marriage markets the idea is simple cities are dense areas where singles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas to enjoy those benefits they are willing to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices once married the benefits from meeting more potential partners vanish and married couples move out of the city attractive singles benefit most from a dense market and are therefore more likely to move to the city those predictions are tested and confirmed with a unique danish data set

understanding the effects of marriage and divorce on financial investments the role of background risk sharing we investigate how changes in marital status affect financial investments and how these effects vary with background risk we use detailed register based panel data and difference in differences estimators to benchmark common unobserved influences on financial investments women increase the fraction of wealth invested in stocks after marriage and decrease it after divorce whereas men show the opposite behavior households whose joint labor income risk is reduced more by marriage have a higher increase in their exposure to risky assets in marriage thus income risk sharing in the household is important for financial risk taking and investment responses to marital transitions jel g11 j12 j16 d14

economic policy uncertainty ceo characteristics and firm r d expenditure a bayesian analysis this paper applies a linear bayesian regression model to study the effects of economic policy uncertainty epu and chief executive officer ceo characteristics on firm research and development r

the salience of culture s consequences the effects of cultural values on top executive commitment to the status quo while top executives are argued to play a central role in strategic adaptation evidence suggests that they are not equally open to organizational change this study extends earlier investigation of the determinants of top executive commitment to the status quo csq to the international arena examining the influence of cultural values on executive open mindedness toward change using data from a survey of top managers in 20 countries analyses reveal that values of individualism uncertainty avoidance power distance and long term orientation are significantly related to executives adherence to existing strategy and leadership profiles further while confirming earlier findings that industry tenure is positively related to strategy csq results show that tenure does not significantly affect leadership csq once cultural values are controlled in summary the findings reveal that culture has an important impact on executive mindsets as demonstrated by the fact that executives of differing cultural background are not equally open to change in organizational strategy and leadership profiles second the findings suggest that executives views of appropriate leadership profiles reflect the imprint of cultural socialization moreso than professional experience finally and more broadly the study offers empirical support for the view that values figure prominently in shaping executives strategic and leadership orientations 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

does board gender diversity have a financial impact evidence using stock portfolio performance there is growing regulatory pressure on firms worldwide to address the under representation of women in senior positions regulators have taken a variety of approaches to the issue we investigate a jurisdiction that has issued recommendations and disclosure requirements rather than implementing quotas much of the rhetoric surrounding gender diversity centres on whether diversity has a financial impact in this paper we take an aggregate market level approach and compare the performance of portfolios of firms with gender diverse boards to those without we also investigate whether having multiple women on the board is linked to performance and if there is a within industry effect overall we do not find evidence of an association between diversity and performance we find some weak evidence of a negative correlation between having multiple women on the board and performance but that in some industries diversity is positively correlated with performance

black economic empowerment disclosures by south african listed corporations the influence of ownership and board characteristics this study investigates the extent to which south african listed corporations voluntarily disclose information on black economic empowerment bee in their annual and sustainability reports using a sample of 75 listed corporations from 2003 to 2009 bee is a form of socio economic affirmative action championed by the african national congress anc led government to address historical imbalances in business participation and ownership in south africa we find that block ownership and institutional ownership are negatively associated with the extent of bee disclosures whereas government ownership board diversity age education ethnicity nationality and occupation board size and non executive directors are positively related to the extent of bee disclosures by contrast dual board leadership structure and gender diversity are not significantly associated with bee disclosures our results are robust when controlling for firm level characteristics fixed effects and alternative disclosure proxies our results are largely consistent with the predictions of agency legitimacy resource dependence and stakeholder theories

the changing of the boards the impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation in 2003 a new law required that 40 of norwegian firms directors be women at the time only 9 of directors were women we use the prequota cross sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota we find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in tobin s q over the following years consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value the quota led to younger and less experienced boards increases in leverage and acquisitions and deterioration in operating performance copyright 2012 oxford university press

the structure of ownership and the theory of the firm the separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owner and of ultimate manager may and often do diverge and where many of the checks which formerly operated to limit the use of power disappear in creating these new relationships the quasi public corporation may fairly be said to work a revolution it has divided ownership into nominal ownership and the power formerly joined to it thereby the corporation has changed the nature of profit seeking enterprise 1

the effects of women on corporate boards on firm value financial performance and ethical and social compliance the european commission has recently proposed the introduction of legally binding quotas for women on corporate boards of european companies this proposal has put the spotlight on the question of whether increasing female representation on the board brings economic benefits to the firm in order to shed light on the issue this study investigates the direct and indirect effects of women on the board on firm value we use a simultaneous equation model to estimate the effects of women on the board on firm value financial performance and compliance with ethical and social principles adopted by the firm we find no evidence that a higher female representation on the board directly affects firm s value however we find indirect effects women on the board are positively related with financial performance measured in terms of return on assets and return on sales and with ethical and social compliance which in turn are positively related with firm value the findings in this study suggest that greater female representation on corporate boards of large european firms can increase firm value indirectly further part of the indirect effect comes from stronger compliance with ethical principles something that is not captured by accounting based financial performance

filling the institutional void the social behavior and performance of family vs non family technology firms in emerging markets family businesses fbs are said to treat their employees with unusual consideration to form a cohesive internal community they are also claimed to develop deeper more extensive connections or relationships with outside stakeholders both behaviors may increase the viability of a business intended to support an owning family and its later generations such social linkages we believe may compensate for the lack of capital product and labor institutional infrastructures in dynamic emerging economies this survey study of a most challenging emerging market sector namely korean hightechnology businesses argues three major points 1 relationships of community and connection will be more common in fbs than in non fbs 2 these relationships will enhance performance in emerging market hightechnology sectors which because of their competitive complex and everchanging nature rely on significant expert knowledge and social capital within and outside the organizational community 3 the performance of fbs will benefit more from these community and connection relationships than the performance of non fbs because in these personally intimate settings employees and external partners will be especially likely to return the generosity of a visibly active owning family or to penalize its selfishness significant empirical support was found for most of these hypotheses

are women better bankers to the poor evidence from rural microfinance institutions microfinance institutions mfis provide financial services to the poor and in many ways resemble both banks and non profit organizations many mfis target women because more women than men are poor especially in rural areas studies show that women manage money differently from men and have different leadership styles thus in credit unions and financial firms female and male managers achieve different results in microfinance gender diversity on the board of mfis is beneficial and loans authorized by female loan officers have lower default rates motivated by these findings we ask whether mfis with a female chief executive officer ceo are more efficient at serving the poor without jeopardizing financial sustainability we adapt the banking approach to managerial in efficiency to account for the outreach and sustainability goals of the mfis and evaluate whether mfis outreach efficiency differs by the gender of their respective ceos we estimate a stochastic frontier cost function using the battese coelli 1995 model and the true random effects estimators using panel data from over 250 mfis we find that mfis with female ceos have significantly higher outreach efficiency than mfis with male ceos similar results are found with a two step stochastic frontier approach overall the results suggest that promoting gender diversity at the top levels of mfi management is likely to have both social and financial benefits

which microfinance institutions are becoming more cost effective with time evidence from a mixture model italian speakers tend to stress the second component of german morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed to improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners own voices basically the method copies contours of f0 local speech rate and intensity from reference utterances of a german native speaker to the learners speech signals it also adds emphasis to the stress position in order to help the learners better recognise the correct pronunciation and identify their errors a perception test with german native speakers revealed that manipulated utterances significantly better reflect lexical stress than the corresponding original utterances thus two groups of italian learners of german were provided with different feedback during a training session one group with manipulated utterances in their individual voices and the other with correctly pronounced original utterances in the teacher s voice afterwards both groups produced the same sentences again and german native speakers judged the resulting utterances resynthesised stimuli especially with emphasised stress were found to be a more effective feedback than natural stimuli to learn the correct stress position since resynthesis was obtained without previous segmentation of the learners speech signals this technology could be effectively included in computer assisted language learning software

on the state of the union an overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenerational mobility agents differ by sex marital status and human capital single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed married couples must decide whether to separate or not parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal a simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female headed families and a high degree of persistence in income across generations to illustrate the model s mechanics the effects of two antipoverty policies namely child support and welfare are investigated

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

family policies wage structures and gender gaps sources of earnings inequality in 20 countries this study uncovers an unexpected effect of family friendly policies on women s economic attainments using hierarchical linear models the analysis combines individual level data obtained from th

board diversity and firm performance evidence from the u k smes this study examines the relationship between board diversity and firm performance in small and medium sized enterprises smes in the u k in particular we investigate the role of gender and age

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women

educational homogamy how much is opportunities individuals match on length and type of education we find that around half of the systematic sorting on education is explained by the tendency of individuals to marry someone who went to the same educational institution or to an institution near them this may be due to low search frictions or selection of people with the same preferences into the same institutions the residual half of the systematic sorting on education is a direct effect of partners education which is potentially explained by complementarities in household production in couples with same education