Board Committees in Corporate Governance: A Cross‐Disciplinary Review and Agenda for the Future

The importance of board committees – specialized subgroups that exist to perform many of the board's most critical functions, such as setting executive compensation, identifying potential board members, and overseeing financial reporting – has grown over time due to increased legal requirements and greater complexity of the environment in which firms operate. This has resulted in a large body of work examining board committees across the accounting, finance, and management disciplines. However, this research has developed rather independently within each discipline, preventing scholars and practitioners from developing a comprehensive understanding of board committees. To address this issue, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature that: 1) summarizes and synthesizes antecedents and outcomes associated with board committees in publicly‐traded firms in English common law countries; and 2) offers a critical analysis of existing research, providing recommendations for advancements and new directions in board committee research.     

Customer reactions to variety: Too much of a good thing?

Summary Studying product variety is an interesting and relevant area for research. Work in this area should build on careful understanding of both customers’ reactions to it and managers’ decision making with respect to it. This requires an interdisciplinary focus, drawing on work in information processing, channels, operations management, game theory, and managerial decision making. In fact, the major advances may come more from combining knowledge from the different areas rather than boring more deeply into a single one. Donald R. Lehmann is George E. Warren Professor of Business at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He has a B.S. degree in mathematics from Union College, Schenectady, New York, and an M.S.I.A. and Ph.D. from the Krannert School of Purdue University. His research interests include modeling individual choice and decision making, understanding group and interdependent decisions, meta-analysis, and the introduction and adoption of innovations. He has taught courses in marketing, management, and statistics. He has published in and served on the editorial boards ofJournal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, andMarketing Science, and is founding editor ofMarketing Letters. In addition to numerous journal articles, he has published four books:Market Research and Analysis, Analysis for Marketing Planning, Product Management, andMeta Analysis in Marketing. Professor Lehmann served as executive director of the Marketing Science Institute from 1993 to 1995 and as president of the Association for Consumer Research in 1995.     

Characteristics and Behaviour of Tourists Who Use Trails

This article documents the popularity of five types of trail-based recreation relative to other forms of recreation that tourists frequently participate in on their trips; identifies these trail users’ cross-participation in other outdoor recreation activities; and profiles the travel behaviour, media habits, trip planning behaviour, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of day hikers and snowmobilers as two particularly large trail user segments. Findings are based on data from a household telephone survey conducted in Michigan, surrounding states, and Ontario, Canada. Hiking/backpacking was found to be the most popular natural resource-based recreation activity that respondents participated in on pleasure trips taken during the past 12 months; other forms of trail-based recreation were significantly less popular; mountain bikers participated in nature-oriented recreation activities in Michigan at levels that were similar to those of hikers/backpackers; and snowmobiling appeared to be the focus of most pleasure trips on which this activity occurred, in contrast to day hiking, which appeared to be more of an ancillary pursuit.     

科隆-波恩机场：一切皆有可能

第一眼看德国科隆-波恩机场,觉得不太可能是一座以普通货物为主的货运机场。毕竟,它是欧洲第三大低成本运营商聚集的机场、是快递集运商的主要枢纽。很坦率地说,该机场从未对一般普通货物业务产生过很大的兴趣。但这在过去三年已经改变了,通过创新的新业务策略,机场建立起第三个业务支柱——吸引全货机运营商到机场开展普货为主的运输业务。     

Prices of deep discount bonds and the Revenue Act of 1978: An evaluation of market response

This article explores the market response of deep discount corporate bonds to the reduction in the capital gains tax rate incorporated into the Revenue Act of 1978. Such tax change should have increased the desirability of assets acquired for capital gains potential, such as deep discount bonds. Examining a time series of prices and returns for a sample of deep discount corporate bonds and a control group of comparable duration and credit risk corporate bonds selling at or near par did indeed provide evidence of a market price reaction. Moreover, the price changes for the deep discount bonds occurred well in advance of the implementation of the tax change.     

Qualities needed in the workplace： Views of college of business undergraduate students

The problem of this study was to determine the views of undergraduate college of business students concerning skill and competencies needed for employment. A questionnaire was developed and administered to junior and senior level students enrolled in the college of business. 360 students completed the questionnaire. Students ranked ＂Integrity/Honesty＂ and ＂Good Work Ethic＂ as the two most important qualities needed for employment. Students believed that ＂Knowledge of a Second Language＂ was the least important quality needed for employment.     

Promoting farm/non‐farm linkages for employment of the poor in South Africa: A research agenda focused on small‐scale farms and agroindustry

This article presents a policy research agenda for the promotion of farm/non‐farm linkages in South Africa. Our premise is that promoting the participation of small farms and small agroindustrial businesses in these linkages will have a strong impact on employment and income for the poor. We argue that there is potential for growth in linkages. The first question of the policy research agenda concerns the current status of linkages, and we note the dearth of research on this. The second question concerns the constraints on and prospects for promoting linkages from the demand side, and the third question treats the same concerns from the supply side. The fourth question is rooted in the duality in South Africa's non‐farm and farm sectors, and asks whether, and how, small and large agroindustrial businesses and farms will compete or relate in ‘business linkages’ that can benefit intersectoral linkages. The final question concerns the impacts of and alternatives for policies and programmes to spur linkages.     

Has the “CEO effect” increased in recent decades? A new explanation for the great rise in America's attention to corporate leaders

We introduce a new explanation for one of the most pronounced phenomena on the American business landscape in recent decades: a dramatic increase in attributions of CEO significance. Specifically, we test the possibility that America's CEOs became seen as increasingly significant because they were, in fact, increasingly significant. Employing variance partitioning methodologies on data spanning 60 years and more than 18,000 firm‐years, we find that the proportion of variance in performance explained by individual CEOs, or “the CEO effect,” increased substantially over the decades of study. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this finding. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Affordability of Adequate Housing

A "quality-based" measure of housing affordability problems employing the cost of housing just meeting adequacy standards is proposed as an improvement over the conventional "high" rent-to-income criterion. Based on Annual Housing Survey data, affordability difficulties grew between 1975 and 1983 by either measure. The conventional measure, however, overestimated the extent of quality-based affordability difficulty for renters by 20% in 1975 and 24% in 1983 based upon Section 8 housing quality standards. In addition, 35% of rental households with an affordability problem by the conventional measure did not have an affordability problem by the quality-based measure, while 19 to 23% of rental households found to have an affordability problem by the quality-based measure were not so classified using the conventional measure.