Corporate Governance Reforms: Redefined Expectations of Audit Committee Responsibilities and Effectiveness

Comprehensive regulatory changes brought on by recent corporate governance reforms have broadly redefined and re-emphasized the roles and responsibilities of all the participants in a public company’s financial reporting process. Most notably, these reforms have intensified scrutiny of corporate audit committees, whose role as protectors of investors’ interests now attracts substantially higher visibility and expectations. As a result, audit committees face the formidable challenge of effectively overseeing the company’s financial reporting process in a dramatically changed – and highly charged – corporate governance environment. This paper discusses the new expectations of audit committee responsibilities and effectiveness in the wake of corporate governance reforms, key challenges, “whistleblower” provisions and shortcomings, and provides some directions for future research.     

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship and the Qualities of Moral Decision Making: Toward A Unifying Framework

At the heart of entrepreneurship are imagination, creativity, novelty, and sensitivity. It takes these qualities to develop a new product or service and bring it to market, to envision the possible impacts a new product may make and come up with novel and creative solutions to problems that may arise. These qualities go to make up what could be called the spirit of entrepreneurship, a spirit that involves the ability to handle the experimental nature of entrepreunerial activity. These same qualities are crucial for moral decision making, and an ethical approach which emphasizes imagination, creativity, and has an experimental thrust is much better adapted to the entrepreneurial activity and much more relevant to the unique situations that entrepreneurs face. In this sense, the process approach to ethics developed in this article is a unifying framework that brings together the activity of entrepreneurship and moral decision making.     

Multisource effects on the satisfaction formation process

Customer satisfaction research is integrated with research on higher education in developing a model of alumni satisfaction with college education. The model proposes that alumni satisfaction with higher education is a function of two performance and disconfirmation attributes: intellectual environment and employment preparation. The model was tested among 475 alumni of a major Eastern undergraduate business school and demonstrates the advantage of modeling the disconfirmation paradigm with multiple sources of satisfaction. She holds a Ph.D. in marketing from Michigan State University. Her work has appeared in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, and proceedings of the American Marketing Association and the Association for Consumer Research. She was formerly an account executive at Needham Harper Worldwide and Director of Marketing at Maxwell Advertising. Her research interests include consumer satisfaction, complaining behavior, and advertising management. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Michigan State University. His work has appeared in theJournal of Advertising, Journal of Retail Banking, Journal of Services Marketing, and theHaring Symposium Proceedings. He has held several positions in the banking industry, most recently as Group Vice President at Michigan National Bank in Grand Rapids. His research interests include services marketing, consumer satisfaction, and direct marketing. She received her Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in theJournal of Retailing, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Marketing Education, and other marketing-related publications. Her research interests include not-for-profit organizations, consumer satisfaction, and services marketing.     

Market sentiment: a key factor of investors’ imitative behaviour

The aim of this paper is to explore herding behaviour among investors to determine its rational and emotional component factors and identify relationships among them. We apply causality tests to evaluate the impact of return and market sentiment on herding intensity. The herding intensity is quantified using the measure developed by Patterson and Sharma (2006) . The research was conducted during the period 1997–2003 in the Spanish stock market, where the presence of herding has been confirmed. The results reveal that the herding intensity depends on past returns and sentiment or subjective assessments and confirm the presence of both a rational and an emotional factor.     

Ein versicherungsmathematischer Ansatz zur Berechnung von Marktwerten der Deckungsrückstellung in der Lebensversicherung

Based on well-known actuarial calculation principles for the determination of the liabilities for life insurance contracts, we present a method for the calculation of fair values of liabilities. This method is consistent with the Solvency II requirements. The main principle is the discounting of probability weighted future cash flows, including assumptions on interest rates, costs and lapse for the calculation of actuarial present values. In addition to the mathematical framework, we discuss some numerical results that compare the traditional liabilities with the fair value approach. The presented principles are also relevant for the IFRS directives, which are at the moment available as exposure draft.     

On the cultural basis of gender differences in negotiation

We study how culture and social structure influence bargaining behavior across gender, by exploring the negotiation culture in matrilineal and patriarchal societies using data from a laboratory experiment and a natural field experiment. One interesting result is that in both the actual marketplace and in the laboratory bargaining game, women in the matrilineal society earn more than men, at odds with years of evidence observed in the western world. We find that this result is critically driven by which side of the market the person is occupying: female (male) sellers in the matrilineal (patriarchal) society extract more of the bargaining surplus than male (female) sellers. In the buyer role, however, we observe no significant differences across societies.