The Removal of a Specialist Oversight Body for Local Public Audit: Insights from the Health Service in England

The abolition of the Audit Commission in England and Wales removes the ‘protector of the public purse’. The oversight body and its audit practice are largely replaced by the private sector regime and audit firms. We analyse the audit market for health service foundation trusts, an area of local public audit that operates without oversight from the Commission. We find evidence of premiums paid to some Big4 firms and that the presence of specialist public service auditors results in fee discounts. The firms limit their liability and assurance of audit quality is reduced under new audit regimes and governance structures.     

Deconstructing the Tower of Babel: a design method to improve empathy and teamwork competences of informatics students

The competence-based education recently launched in Spanish universities presents a set of abilities and skills that are difficult to teach to students in higher and more technologically-oriented grades. In this paper, a teaching intervention that is based on design methodologies is proposed, to upgrade the competitive capacities of computer engineering students. In particular, this intervention targets those aspects relating to working in multidisciplinary teams and to defining requirements based on the user’s empathy and knowledge. The main idea inspiring this technique is that the underlying challenge is a communication problem. As Brooks (1995) states in his book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, even a project having all of the prerequisites for success (a clear mission, manpower, materials, time and adequate technology) could fail as a Tower of Babel. The proposed technique through mixed methods has been evaluated with students enrolled in different courses, confirming the repeatability and validity of this method from quantitative measurement, from observation of the results, and from ascertaining the value perceived by students and their attitudes.     

New development: Women with altitude—exploring the influence of female presence and leadership on boards of directors

This article reports on a study examining the influence of women on the boards of directors of NHS foundation trusts in England in the light of a recent UK government inquiry into women in senior positions. A high female presence among executive and non-executive directorships did not result in significant differences either in financial return or service quality. However, female chairs or chief executives resulted in significant reductions in negative social outcomes, such as lower clinical negligence costs, without harming financial management. The findings have important implications for gender diversity and gender targets on the boards of directors in business and other sectors.     

Correlation as probability: applications of Sheppard’s formula to financial assets

In this paper, a result for bivariate normal distributions from statistics is transformed into a financial asset context in order to build a tool which can translate a correlation matrix into an equivalent probability matrix and vice versa. This way, the correlation coefficient parameter is more understandable in terms of joint probability of two stocks’ returns, and much more useful in terms of the information it provides. We validate, empirically, our result for a sample covering the three market capitalization categories in the S&P 500 index over a ten-year period. Finally, the accuracy of this new tool is measured theoretically and some applications from the practitioners’ point of view are offered. Such applications include, for instance, the calculation of the number of trading days in a year in which two stocks have same sign returns and how to split the average return of weighted stocks into four orthants.     

Media visibility and corporate social responsibility investment evidence in Spain

Despite the extensive research in both the determinants and the results of corporate social responsibility (CSR), relatively few studies have considered extra-legal institutions as potential determinants of CSR. Our work fills this gap by looking at how media attention affects CSR over a long-term period in a continental European setting. Our results show that media coverage positively affects CSR. Additional scrutiny triggered by media coverage encourages dominant owners to signal their commitment to limiting self-dealing transactions and their orientation toward stakeholders' needs through CSR investments. Additionally, our results reveal that this signaling device offers greater benefits and lower costs in firms where controlling owners show a voting-cash flow wedge. Our results are relevant to different actors such as investors, auditors, and policy makers as they provide solid evidence that media coverage is an important driver of CSR orientation in a continental European setting.     

The influence of individual characteristics on getting involved in an entrepreneurial team: The contingent role of individualism

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - A traditional stereotype of the entrepreneur is that of a lone hero. However, many entrepreneurs engage in new businesses as members of...     

Board of director attributes: effects on financial performance in SMEs

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This paper analyses the relationship between board of director (BoD) attributes and financial performance in small and medium-sized...     

Factors that determine the degree of fulfilment of expectations for entrepreneurs from the business incubator programmes

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - The uncertain economic situation that was experienced because of the global financial crisis in 2008 and the exponential growth in the use of...