Are all outside directors created equal with respect to firm disclosure policy?

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This study looks into the role of corporate life cycle on market discounts and firm performance in private placements. Using the standard event study...     

Relations between organizational commitment and focal and discretionary behaviours

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relations between organizational commitment (OC) dimensions and two focal and discretionary behaviours (intention to stay and organizational citizenship behaviour). Drawing on a sample of 310 Spanish employees of small services firms, this research reveals that in contrast to recent findings that detected a nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between continuance commitment and intention to stay, the form of the relationships between OC dimensions and the proposed outcomes is linear rather than nonlinear. Furthermore, when dividing continuance commitment into two subcomponents, the research results indicate that the dimension associated with commitment based on few existing employment alternatives is significantly, negatively and linearly related to intention to stay and organizational citizenship behaviour. This suggests that the three-component model of OC suffers from a conceptual inconsistency, which is further discussed.     

Board Composition and Accounting Conservatism: The Role of Business Experts,Support Specialist and Community Influentials

In this study, we examine the relationship between accounting conservatism and board composition. We categorise outside directors according to their skills, abilities, connections and knowledge in three different categories: business experts, support specialists and community influentials. We address three main questions: Is the financial and accounting expertise of directors relevant to improving accounting conservatism? Does specialised expertise in the board affect the speed at which news is reflected in earnings? And how do the political ties of directors affect the sensitivity of earnings to bad news? Our sample consists of active US biotech firms publicly traded on the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ stock exchanges during the 2005–2013 period. Our study confirms that not all outside directors are equally effective in monitoring and contracting and that certain kinds of outside directors, such as politicians, can even lower the sensitivity of earnings to bad news. Our robustness analysis confirms that these results are not conditional on the accounting measure, and suggest that distinguishing directors according to their skills and abilities is crucial to understanding the way in which firm boards affect conservatism.     

Can culture be changed? a study of internal marketing

The article explores the ways in which internal marketing initiatives work in a number of UK retail banks from the point of view of both managers and employees. It suggests that although internal marketing attempts to function as a culture change mechanism, the resulting organisational cultures rather than being homogenous and united around the imagery of the consumer and service quality are in fact fragmented, ambiguous and contested by a variety of organisational stakeholders.