The development of socially responsible investment in South Africa: experience and evolution of SRI in global markets

Sustainability practices, particularly those relating to Socially Responsible Investment (SRI), have still to be fully evolved in a developing country context. This article considers international trends in SRI and how these may relate to South Africa. It considers how, internationally, SRI has become increasingly motivated by the business case for risk-management and therefore how it may have the potential to offer superior returns (as demonstrated by recent experience in the United States). It examines the relevance of SRI trends to South Africa, where the concept of SRI still faces further structural development, and reviews the performance of funds operating in the South African SRI arena.     

The German model of employee relations on trial: negotiated and unilaterally imposed change in multi‐national companies

This article investigates the effects of negotiated and unilaterally imposed change on employee relations in the German subsidiaries of a Finnish and a German multi‐national company (MNC). We look at how the strategies affect the sustainability of the current German model of employee relations and highlight some of the disadvantages of this model for global MNCs.     

Brand value accounting: an international comparison of perceived managerial implications

Data concerned with the managerial implications of brand value accounting were collected from accountants and marketing managers working in strongly branded companies in New Zealand (N.Z.), the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the United States (U.S.). Since the external reporting climate in the U.S. prohibits the inclusion of brand value as a separate asset in the published balance sheet, it was anticipated that U.S. managers would be the least positively disposed to the potential of beneficial managerial implications deriving from brand valuation. Contrary to this expectation, managers in the U.K are the least positively disposed to potential managerial implications associated with brand value accounting. This result is particularly interesting as brand value accounting has commanded considerable attention from the U.K. accounting profession since the late 1980s when several large U.K. companies elected to capitalize brand values in their external financial statements. In addition to the international differences noted, the degree of commonality of findings across the three countries is also noteworthy. The data reported provide strong support for the view that there is considerable potential for positive managerial implications from brand value accounting.     

Temporary immigration visas

This paper deals with recent proposals concerning temporary immigration visas as a means to combat the problem of illegal immigration. We set up a simple two-period model of international migration between a poor South and a rich North with temporary visas issued for one period. Because of capital market imperfections, immigrants from the South face additional capital costs when financing the visa fee. In this model, we find that temporary visas can improve welfare in the North if capital costs of the immigrants are sufficiently low. For high capital costs, however, a welfare reduction cannot be ruled out. We extend the model to the case of heterogeneous immigrants and asymmetric information. In this setting, we show that the government in the North may have an incentive to issue temporary visas for those with low capital costs and to tolerate illegal immigration of the others.     

Gender gaps across the earnings distribution for full-time employees in Britain: Allowing for sample selection

This paper investigates gender differences across the log wage distributions of British employees working full-time in 2005. The raw gender wage gap shows a tendency to increase across the distribution with a glass ceiling effect indicated. A strong relationship between high skilled, white-collar occupations and carrying out managerial duties with the glass ceiling effect is indicated in the data. After allowing for positive selection into full-time employment by British women, a substantially larger gender earning gap is found: the selection corrected gender wage gap is close to twice the raw gap across most of the earnings distribution. This selection corrected gap is found to be predominantly related to women receiving lower rewards for their characteristics than men. Indeed, the results suggest the gender earnings gap would all but disappear across the earnings distribution if women working full-time received the same returns to their characteristics as men working full-time in Britain do.     

Determinants of tender offer post-acquisition financial performance

The present study extends previous research efforts and examines relationships between commonly discussed strategic acquisition factors and long-term financial performance measures of acquiring firms. The factors of interest include relative size, previous acquisition experience, organizational age, industry commonality, contested versus uncontested acquisitions, and percentage of stock acquired. The financial performance measures include both accounting and capital market data for the 4-year period preceding acquisition activity and the 4-year period following such activity. The study presents bivariate and multivariate analyses for 42 industrial manufacturing firms that engaged in the tender offer form of acquisition. The findings indicate that, on the average, post-acquisition financial performance improved significantly for organizations that had previous acquisition experience, acquired a higher percentage of a target, or were older. Post-acquisition performance decreased significantly for acquiring firms when target firms contested an acquisition.