Whistle-Blowing Among Young Employees: A Life-Course Perspective

The 2003 National Business Ethics Survey, conducted by the Ethics Resource Center, found that respondents who were both young and had short organizational tenure were substantially less likely than other respondents to report misconduct that they observed in the workplace to an authority. We propose that the life-course model of deviance can help account for this attenuation of acquiescence in misbehavior. As employees learn to perceive informal prosocial control during their socialization into the workforce, we hypothesize that they will become more willing to blow the whistle on misconduct. Analysis of the 2003 NBES (n = 1,417, with a subset of 314 who observed misconduct) reveals that young and short-tenured employees do perceive less informal prosocial control, and that informal prosocial control does boost whistle-blowing; however, tests for mediation of the relationship between youth and short-tenure and whistle-blowing by informal social control were largely negative, suggesting that other explanations are still needed.     

Did accelerated filing requirements and SOX Section?404 affect the timeliness of 10-K filings?

This paper examines the effect of Sarbanes-Oxley provisions on 10-K filing delays. We find that tightened filing deadlines for accelerated and large accelerated filers are not associated with changes in the incidence of late filing. While Section 404 compliance does not affect filing timeliness for firms with effective internal controls, we find that about half the firms disclosing internal control weaknesses are late filers. As a consequence, many Section 404 material weakness firms experience negative abnormal returns around late filing notifications before filing the 10-K. Lastly, we find that market reactions to late filing notifications are more negative when management provides no meaningful explanation for the delay, consistent with managers’ incentives to withhold bad news.     

Internet searches and transactions on the Dutch housing market

We use Google searches of the word ‘mortgage’ to explain monthly housing transactions in the Netherlands in the period from 2004 until 2015. Our estimates indicate that Google searches of the previous months are significantly positively associated with housing transactions in the current month. This shows evidence that Internet search data can provide information about real market behaviour.     

Controlling New Products in Large Diversified Firms: A Presidential Perspective

This article reports the findings of a pilot research project which investigated the nature and degree of control that presidents of large, diversified firms exercise over their new product initiatives. The research findings of this exploratory study challenge some of the conventional notions that exist regarding the management of new products. The control dimensions associated with "high" and "low" new product output situations are identified, and the role of a new product's strategic category in understanding the variations in presidential control is underscored. Most important, the findings represent a first step in capturing the "balance" that presidents appear to strike between "loose" and "tight" control when managing new products. As such, they suggest the potential for developing a control template against which presidents of other large, diversified firms might someday be able to judge their own new product control practices.     

Science and industry: a theory of networks and paradigms

The recent interest in 'network' forms of organization serves as a starting point to understand better the dynamic characteristics of technology development. Network theory allows one to describe the relationship between 'actors' involved in the development of new technologies, both cross-sectionaily and longitudinally, and, as a consequence, to model the structural and behavioural developement of a community of actors (regardless of whether this 'community' is defined as a set of individuals, e.g. the 'scientific' community, or is defined as a collection of organizations, e.g. an industry). In this paper, this network approach is used to develope a theoretical framework to undersiand the knowledge transition from 'scientific' paradigm status to a 'technological' paradigm status. It is belived that the propositions made in this paper will enable truly empirical studies on the nature of the development of 'scientific' and 'technological' paradigms.