Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance: The Role of Executive Compensation

This article examines the relationship between corporate governance and corporate sustainability by focusing on an essential component of companies' governance structure: executive compensation programs. We propose an original empirical strategy based on a large set of the biggest capitalizations in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over the period 2004–2018, with explicit measures of how companies integrate into executive managers' remuneration precise criteria of corporate social responsibility, an incentive scheme called corporate social responsibility (CSR) contracting. Our results show that proposing executive compensation programs including CSR criteria has a negative impact on financial performance, and a large positive impact on extra-financial performance based on the following dimensions: relationship with customers and suppliers, and community involvement. Second, we explore the moderating role of the corporate governance model by distinguishing the impact between firms with a shareholder or stakeholder corporate governance model and reveal significant differences in the impact of CSR contracting. For firms with a stakeholder corporate governance model, CSR contracting is no longer associated with a fall of financial performance and has a large positive impact on human resources, environmental, and human rights performance. On the other hand, CSR contracting has a negative impact on financial performance but no impact on extra-financial performance for firms with a shareholder corporate governance model.     

Corporate Governance Structure and Employment Adjustment in Japan: An Empirical Analysis Using Corporate Finance Data

I investigate the influence of corporate governance structures on employment adjustment in Japanese firms, using financial data for firms listed on the Japanese stock market. The results indicate that corporate governance structures affect the rate of employment adjustment. The presence of large stockholders and the degree of stock cross–holding lengthens the period the firm remains in debt and slows down the speed of employment adjustment.     

Finance,Corporate Governance,and the Employment Relationship

This comparative paper examines the relationship between equity markets and corporate governance on one hand, and job tenure, training, and pay on the other. Two dimensions of equity markets and corporate governance are used: share trading activity and mergers and acquisitions. There is support for the posited links between these measures and job tenure, employee stock ownership plans, pay dispersion, and collective bargaining arrangements. Evidence on the relationship with training is more mixed.     

Employment Change after Takeovers: The Role of Executive Ownership

The article examines the impact of executive ownership and other ownership and governance factors on employment change after takeovers. Drawing on a dataset of 235 takeovers, the results show that there is a reduction in employment in just over 50 per cent of the sample. Higher levels of executive share ownership are associated with lower probabilities of employee layoffs post‐takeover, and there is a positive relationship between executive ownership and employment growth. The effect of executive options on employment change is generally insignificant, as are the effects of other features of ownership and governance. The evidence suggests that executives with higher levels of ownership tend to mount takeovers of better‐performing firms and to implement takeovers aimed at growth.     

Job Mobility in Europe,Japan and the United States

Evidence about job mobility outside the United States is scarce and difficult to compare cross‐nationally because of non‐uniform data. We document job mobility patterns of college graduates in their first three years in the labour market, using unique uniform data covering 11 European countries and Japan. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we replicate the information in this survey to compare the results with the United States. We find that (a) US graduates hold more jobs than European graduates, (b) contrasting conventional wisdom, job mobility in Japan is only somewhat lower than the European average, and (c) there are large differences in job mobility within Europe.     

Managerial Values Across Cultures: Australia, Hong Kong and the United States

The relationship between personal managerial values and a range of important organisational variables has increasingly been recognised. Personal values are shaped by the wider cultural milieu in which the individual is socialised. Managers from different cultural contexts may therefore be expected to possess different work and business-related values. However, exposure to a more universalistic managerial ethos may also generate a degree of similarity in managerial values across cultural contexts. In order to examine these issues, the values and expectations of managers in Hong Kong (N = 653), Australia (N = 505) and the United States (N = 1,060) were compared. Both differences and similarities were revealed, leading to speculations about the relative impact of culture versus roles on managerial values.     

Industrial Relations and Relative Income Shares in the United States

This paper examines the effects of unemployment on the relative incomeshares of labor and capital in the post-World War II U.S. economy. In our econometric model, the "reserve army" effect of unemployment is mediated by the "inertia" effect of prevailing bargaining norms. Estimates of this model indicate: (1) the presence of a significant reserve army effect through the mid-1960s, a diminished effect in the late 1960s and 1970s, and a restored effect in the 1980s; and (2) a significant decline in the inertia effect of bargaining norms in the 1980s.     

经济奇迹的助推器--日本、美国与欧洲质量奖综述

近年来,通过推行国家质量奖计划来提升企业的管理水平已成为许多国家强化和提高产业竞争力的重要途径,除了一些发达国家和地区外,许多新兴的工业化国家和发展中国家也都设立了国家质量奖。在全世界诸多国家质量奖计划中,影响最大的当推日本爱德华·戴明质量奖(EdwardDemingPrize)、美国马尔科姆·波德里奇质量奖(MalcolmBaldrigeAward)和欧洲质量奖(EuropeanQualityAward),这三大质量奖被誉为卓越管理与绩效模式的创造者和经济奇迹的助推器。一、日本爱德华·戴明质量奖1949年,为了引进和推广质     

New Venture Performance in China,Japan, and the United States: The Impact of Formalized Market Information Processes

New venture companies, starting from small entities comprising entrepreneurs and their teams, start to grow in scale by instigating formalized processes to enhance management efficiency. This includes the use of formalized processes for collecting and disseminating market information. Despite the fact that utilizing market information is one of the fundamental factors of market orientation, little is known about the way market information is processed in new venture companies. The first aim of this research was to investigate the impact of formalized market information acquisition and utilization on new venture performance. The second objective was to investigate the effect of organizational formalization on the acquisition and utilization of market information in new venture firms. The final goal was to explore the extent to which these relationships vary in different cultural contexts. Based on an extensive literature review and interviews with managers in China, Japan, and the United States, a conceptual framework is developed that relates formalized market information processes to new venture performance in the three countries. The conceptual model is tested with data collected from 453 new venture companies in these countries. The results suggest that the use of a formalized process of market information utilization has a positive effect on new venture performance regardless of country. The analysis also indicates that the effect of organizational formalization, in general, differs between countries. Organizational formalization is associated with increased formalized utilization of market information only in the United States; the relationship does not apply in the two Asian countries studied. Taken together, these results suggest that in the Asian countries, organizational formalization improves information collection, while in the United States, it also improves the utilization of information throughout the organization. One implication of these results may be the potential of added benefits accruing to organizational formalization in new ventures in countries with high levels of individualism and/or high levels of power distance, where organizational power is concentrated in formal vertical reporting relationships, as opposed to informal horizontal peer‐to‐peer networks.     

Unions and Work Attitudes in the United States and Japan

Examining whether Japanese enterprise unions have a negative effect on employee job attitudes or whether they forge a stronger bond between the worker and the firm, our results indicate that union membership has no effect on Japanese employees' job satisfaction, but that there is some negative impact on company commitment. Much of the union effect on U.S. workers' job attitudes stems from lower job complexity, work autonomy, perceived promotion chances, and quality circle membership.     

Lessons from broadband development in Canada,Japan, Korea and the United States

Broadband network development does not always track closely a nations overall wealth and economic strength. The International Telecommunication Union reported that in 2005 the five top nations for broadband network market penetration were: Korea, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada. The ITU ranked the United States sixteenth in broadband penetration.Aside from the obvious geographical and demographic advantages accruing to small nations with large urban populations, broadband development thrives when it becomes a national priority. Both developed and developing nations have stimulated capital expenditures for infrastructure in ways United States public and private sector stakeholders have yet to embrace. Such investments have accrued ample dividends including the lowest broadband access costs in the world. For example, the ITU reports that in 2002 Japanese consumers paid $0.09 per 100 kilobits per second of broadband access compared to $3.53 in the United States.Economic policies do not completely explain why some nations offer faster, better cheaper and more convenient broadband services while other nations do not. This paper will examine best practices in broadband network development with an eye toward determining the optimal mix of legislative, regulatory and investment initiatives. The paper will track development in Canada, Japan and Korea as these nations have achieved success despite significantly different geographical, political and marketplace conditions. The paper also notes the institutional and regulatory policies that have hampered broadband development in the United States.The paper also will examine why incumbent local exchange and cable television operators recently have begun aggressively to pursue broadband market opportunities. The paper will analyze incumbents’ rationales for limited capital investment in broadband with an eye toward determining the credibility of excuses based on regulatory risk and uncertainty. The paper concludes with suggestions how national governments might expedite broadband infrastructure development.     

Manufacturing environments in South Korea,Japan and the United States of America: A note

This paper reports a comparative analysis of the manufacturing facilities and the degree of automation of major manufacturing corporations in South Korea, Japan and the United States. We suggest that South Korea is behind Japan and the United States in manufacturing technology, but is aggressively incorporating automated equipment or processes into the manufacturing system.This project has been supported by a grant from the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry.     

治理伦理与公司治理:二维治理结构的建立

流行的公司治理理论是以制度性机制为单一维度的分析框架。本文通过对公司治理行为所暗含的“私人安排”的分析,将伦理参数导入公司治理的机制体系,建立了一个扩展成的“二维治理结构”。通过对几种典型的治理结构的比较分析,指出“治理伦理”标准化和职能化,以及提高伦理治理强度是改善公司治理绩效的关键环节之一。     

A study of company profit-rate time series: Japan and the United States

Usinf the methodology of D.C. Mueller as well as the alternative model we propose, we estimate the long-run profit rate (normalized to the cross-company mean in each year to eliminate the effect of the general rise or decline in profitability) of each of 294 major Japanese manufacturing corporations using the time series of its profit rate over 1964–1980. Three of the major findings are (1) a company with a high (low) initial profit rate tended to earn a high (low) profit rate even in the long run, implying a persistence of intercompany profit-rate differences, and (2) across companies, the estimated long-run profit rates were similarly distributed between Japan (our estimates) and the United States (Mueller's estimates), but (3) the movement of profit rate is more volatile and can be less well explained by the model in Japan. Further studies on the time series of the company profit rate revealed that the cross-company variance of the normalized profit rate (which equals the coefficient of variation of the unnormalized profit rate) was smaller in Japan in every year from 1964 to 1972, which together with the observed larger interindustry profit-rate differences, suggests smaller intraindustry intercompany profit-rate differences in Japan. Some preliminary discussions are given to eplain these findings.     

Corporate Governance and Performance: The REIT Effect

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) offer a natural experiment in corporate governance due to the fact that they leave little free cash flow for management, which reduces agency problems. We exploit a unique and leading corporate governance database to test whether corporate governance matters for the performance of U.S. REITs. We document for a sample including governance ratings of more than 220 REITs that firm value is significantly related to firm-level governance for REITs with low payout ratios only. Repeating the analysis with the complete database that includes more than 5,000 companies and a control sample of firms with high corporate real estate ratios, we find a strong and significantly positive relation between our governance index and several performance variables, indicating that the partial lack of a relation between governance and performance in the real estate sector might be explained by a REIT effect.     

Explaining the Small Employment Effects of the Minimum Wage in the United States

This paper reviews the most recent wave of research—roughly since 2000—on the employment effects of the U.S. minimum wage and concludes that the weight of evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases. The paper then examines eleven possible adjustments to minimum‐wage increases that may explain why the measured employment effects are consistently small. Given the relatively low cost to employers of modest increases in the minimum wage, these adjustment mechanisms appear to be sufficient to avoid employment losses, even for employers with a large share of low‐wage workers.     

Different but Similar: Geothermal Energy and the Role of Politics in Germany, Iceland and the United States

This article looks into the role of the state in geothermal energy development. Based on the findings in three countries studied, it demonstrates that the demand for political intervention is strongly tied to the state of the technological and industry development. While government’s most important role in the early stages is R&D-support and regulatory guidelines, the relevance of market-based instruments and network support kicks in later. Between these two phases is a period where both ‘toolkits’ of political intervention (direct investment and indirect support efforts) have to be provided by state actors. Furthermore, the project timeline has to be kept in mind. Supporting project economics alone is not sufficient if project-internal barriers exist that cannot be overcome without specific support. The installation of an insurance scheme for dry wells in Germany and a similar mechanism in Iceland can be regarded as outstanding examples of this. However, it is important to note that geothermal energy generally will not be developed without strong public support in all development phases. The common cross-case barriers alone are sufficient for project developers and investors to be cautious about entering the industry. But if governments engage with the right instruments at the right time, there is reason to say that geothermal energy can provide a contribution to the energy turn towards renewable energies in many parts of the world, even apart from high-enthalpy regions.     

Competitive forces and strategic choice decisions: an experimental investigation in the United States and Japan

Managers operate in a complex, uncertain environment and tend to form simplified models in order to cope with this environment and make competitive strategic decisions (i.e., cost‐leadership, differentiation, or focus). In this study, we use an experimental design to examine the strategic choice decision‐making process in firms located in the United States and Japan. We develop several main‐effect propositions regarding managerial selection of competitive strategies, depending on the competitive forces (buyer power, threat of substitutes, threat of new firm entry, and high intensity of rivalry) they are facing. We propose a main effect due to country of origin: Japanese managers prefer a cost‐leadership strategy more than American managers do. We also propose several interaction effects regarding cross‐national differences in strategy selection between Japanese and U.S. managers. To test our propositions, we collected experimental data from 316 U.S. executives and 459 Japanese executives. We assessed relative impacts of the competitive forces on strategic decision‐making using a multilevel regression analysis. The research findings indicated that high buyer power and high substitution threat were associated with a preference for cost‐leadership strategies, and Japanese managers were significantly more likely to prefer a cost‐leadership strategy than U.S. managers. We also found that, under conditions of high buyer power, U.S. managers were less likely than Japanese managers to enter a market with a differentiation or focus strategy. We found little support for other interaction hypotheses, suggesting points of similarity between U.S. and Japanese managers. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications of our results. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.