Beyond the Legal Environment: How Stigma Influences Invisible Identity Groups in the Workplace

Diversity research assumes that social interaction is influenced by a social categorization that arises from visible and readily detectable differences. How does this process work when the differences are not readily detectable? We explore the legal protections that shape the employment environment for people with invisible identities and how invisibility influences the common social dimensions of stigma these individuals experience. These social dimensions are resistant to change and therefore change occurs slowly: stigma cannot simply be legislated away. On the basis of our comparisons of social identity groups with invisible characteristics we discuss four dimensions that are especially relevant for understanding the social dynamics of invisible diversities.     

Using house prices to compute the price of housing in the CPI

Rental-equivalence is often used in computing price changes of owner-occupied housing in the CPI. We use an alternative approach, employing interest-adjusted house prices. For Norway 2000–2008 our method yielded a 30% CPI-increase, compared to the official 17%.     

An empirical analysis of the corporate control,tax and incentive motivations for adopting leveraged employee stock ownership plans

This paper examines three motivations for leveraged ESOP adoption: as a takeover defense, as a mechanism for providing incentives to employees and as a vehicle for tax savings. ESOP adoption is more likely for companies with a higher predicted probability of takeover, but ESOP adopters have many characteristics that are different from takeover targets. Companies that adopt ESOPs can be distinguished from non-adopting companies based on characteristics associated with the tax and incentive effects of these plans. The size of the ESOP is shown to depend primarily on the tax and incentive characteristics.     

HR's role in corporate governance: Present and prospective

Corporate wrongdoing is damaging investor confidence and tarnishing the credibility of the U.S. business community, guilty and innocent alike. Some misdeeds are clearly criminal, others simply unethical or damaging to reputations. They range from “massaging” numbers (“managed earnings”), which tests the limits of financial prudence, to outright fraud. Caught in the limelight are U.S. corporate giants representing some of the world's best‐known brands and most famous CEOs, many only yesterday lionized in the business press. We have explored this issue from the perspective of the HR function through a survey of the senior HR professionals who attended the Human Resources Forum. The survey was augmented with focus groups. Our purpose was to understand current practices, attitudes, and behaviors with respect to legal standards and professional and ethical codes. We also explored the roles of the CEO, HR leadership, and the HR function in minimizing ethical breaches that have diminished investor and public trust. We hope to shed light on the responsibilities, actions, and risks of the HR function and its leadership now and in the future. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Are Risk Factor Disclosures Still Relevant? Evidence from Market Reactions to Risk Factor Disclosures Before and After the Financial Crisis

The SEC's Disclosure Effectiveness Initiative (December 2013) highlights a difference between accounting regulators and academics in their perceptions of Item 1A risk factor disclosure effectiveness. Because most academic evidence relies on pre‐financial crisis data, we compare changes in risk factor disclosure informativeness before and after the crisis as a possible explanation for this disconnect. We further explore this discrepancy by considering (i) three classes of market participants, (ii) new, discontinued, and repeated disclosures, and (iii) nonmarket outcomes. Our results confirm previous findings but indicate that those results no longer hold in the subsequent period. Specifically, we find that although equity, option, and bond markets react to unexpected risk factor disclosures in the period leading up to the financial crisis (2006–2008), the market reactions decline significantly in the post‐crisis period (2009–2014). Perhaps surprisingly, the documented changes in informativeness are not driven by disclosures repeated from one year to the next but instead result from new disclosures initiated in the current year and, in the option and debt markets, also from disclosures discontinued from the previous year. Finally, using the Altman Z‐score as an objective bankruptcy risk measure, we find that the association between risk factor disclosures and companies’ future bankruptcy risk declines significantly in the post financial crisis period. Taken together, these findings contribute to the current disclosure effectiveness debate by highlighting that risk factor disclosures, which were informative in the preceding period, become less reflective of the underlying economic risks and thus less informative to investors in the post‐crisis period. La déclaration des facteurs de risque est‐elle toujours pertinente ? Données tirées des réactions du marché à la déclaration des facteurs de risque avant et après la crise financière     

Nonrecurring Items in Debt Contracts

Using a large sample of debt contracts, we study the determinants of excluding nonrecurring items from covenant calculations. We investigate this choice across firms, across items, and through time. We find that nonrecurring items are more likely to be excluded when the agency costs of debt are higher and less likely to be excluded when they predict borrowers' performance. Our evidence further suggests that the interplay between agency costs and nonrecurring items' predictive ability affects the decision to exclude these items from covenant computations. Finally, when examining the exclusion by different nonrecurring item types, we find confirmatory evidence that the probability of exclusion decreases with the predictive ability for borrowers' future performance of major nonrecurring item types. Overall, our research extends the literature on the determinants of contract design and improves understanding of the usefulness of accounting information in debt contracting.     

The customer-based corporate reputation scale: Replication and short form

Corporate reputation attracts significant attention among marketing scholars. However, researchers often overlook customers' opinions specifically. Walsh and Beatty [Walsh, G., Beatty, S.E., Measuring Customer-based Corporate Reputation: Scale Development, Validation, and Application. J Acad Mark Sci 2007; 35(1): 127–143.] identify dimensions of customer-based corporate reputation (CBR); they develop scales to measure these dimensions. Researchers in the present study use the Walsh and Beatty CBR scale in the UK and Germany across contexts to study the cross-cultural validity of the measure of customer-based corporate reputation. This study assesses an abbreviated version of the CBR scale (with 15 items). The CBR Short scale has equally good dimensional properties as the original scale. The paper ends with implications for cross-cultural marketing research and management.     

The Effects of Taxes,Agency Costs and Information Asymmetry on Earnings Management: A Comparison of Public and Private Firms

The realization of securities gains and losses to manage earnings in publicly-traded bank holding companies has been documented in a large number of studies, but very little is known about why managers engage in this behavior. Two possible explanations for earnings management put forth by Warfield, Wild, and Wild (1995) are that managers engage in this behavior either to circumvent accounting-based contracts designed to mitigate agency problems, or to reduce information asymmetry.We compare public and private banks' realizations of securities gains and losses to determine how their earnings management differs. We find that public banks consistently engage in more earnings management than private banks, and that the portion of their current period securities gains and losses attributable to earnings management is more positively associated with next period's earnings before securities gains and losses. These findings are consistent with earnings management occurring due to greater information asymmetry in public firms, and suggest that earnings management may not necessarily lead to the erosion in the quality of earnings suggested by Levitt (1998).     

做好风险预案

什么是危机呢？损害到企业的人事、声誉、资产等影响企业持续运营的事件都可能是危机。危机一旦发生,必然会损害到企业的利益,因此企业必须有一套风险预案。而由于危机的不确定性,企业在准备风险预案和应对危机的时候,必须做好两个方面的工作。