Entrenched management,capital structure changes and firm value

The relationship between managerial share ownership and the firm’s change in leverage around a security issuance is examined. We find that entrenched managers are not more likely to issue equity, however they do affect lower leverage by choosing debt issuances which are smaller and equity issuances that are larger than those chosen by managers that are not entrenched. The magnitude of the decline in leverage that occurs from before the issuance to after the issuance is positively related to managerial share ownership. In addition, this relationship is confined to only the “entrenchment” range of managerial share ownership. The market reacts negatively to an issuance announcement when managerial share ownership is high.

Agency problems in tracking stock and minority carve-out decisions: Explaining the discrepancy in short- and long-term performances

Several studies have evaluated short- and long-term performances of parent firms who resort to restructuring via tracking stock or minority carve-out. Results show that short-term positive performance of restructuring parents turns negative in the long haul. Although researchers have attempted to resolve this inconsistency, a satisfactory explanation is yet to emerge. In this paper, we offer the self-serving behavior of restructuring parents’ managers as a potential explanation for the observed discrepancy in the short- and long-term performances. We argue that managers of parent firms create new units to receive additional compensation packages. We present evidence that the long-term negative performance can be attributed, at least partially, to self-awarded raise. Since managers of tracking stock parents enjoy a greater degree of managerial discretion and controls, we hypothesize that they would pay themselves a bigger compensation package than their carve-out counterparts and their long-term performance would be inferior to that of the latter group. Our results largely support these hypotheses.

Decomposing productivity patterns in a conditional convergence framework

In this study we examine regional data on per worker GDP, disaggregated at sectoral level, by focusing our interest on the role of differences in the sectoral composition of activities, and in productivity gaps that are uniform across sectors, in explaining the catching-up process, which is realized through physical and human capital as well as technological knowledge accumulation. Our objective is to investigate how much of the interregional inequality in aggregate productivity per worker is imputable to each component. A methodology for identifying and analyzing sources of inequality from a decomposed perspective is developed in the growth framework by combining a shift-share based technique and a SUR model specification for the conditional-convergence analysis. The proposed approach is employed to analyze aggregate interregional inequality of per worker productivity levels in Italy over the period 1970–2000. With respect to the existing empirical results, our approach provides a more comprehensive and detailed examination of the contribution of each identified component in explaining the regional productivity gaps in Italy. It is argued that region-specific productivity differentials, uniform across sectors, explain a quite large share of differences in productivity per worker. However, sectoral composition plays a non negligible role, although decreasing since the end of 1980s, and very different productivity patterns emerge within geographical areas.

Optimal Allocation for Comparing <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> Test Treatments to Positive and Negative Control with Unequal Weighting Under A-optimality and MV-optimality

Experiments in real life often involve comparisons of test treatments to more than one control. However, the controls may not always be of equal importance. In this paper we introduce weighted MV optimality criterion and present a detailed study using both weighted A and MV optimality criteria, of the problem of optimally comparing a set of test treatments to two controls (positive and a negative) that are of unequal importance to the experimenter.     

Polar sets of fractional Brownian sheets

The properties of the polar sets are discussed for a real-valued (N, d)-fractional Brownian sheet with Hurst index. Sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for a compact set to be polar for the fractional Brownian sheet are proved. The infimum of Hausdorff dimensions of its polar sets are also obtained by means of constructing a Cantor-type set to connect its Hausdorff dimension and capacity. Research supported by the National Natural Foundation of China (10471148), the Sci-tech Innovation Item for Excellent Young and Middle-Aged University Teachers of Educational Department of Hubei (200316).     

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

We study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. We compare profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives in all sets of a given profile and the difference between the number of alternatives in the individual sets. We also show that, under additional axioms, we can combine these criteria only in a weighted procedure or in some lexicographic refinements of a weighted procedure.      

On-duty and Off-duty: Employee Right to Privacy and Employer’s Right to Control in the Private Sector

The changing legal landscape of the right of the employer to control and monitor employee behavior is examined. Two distinct areas are defined: behavioral monitoring and behavioral restrictions. Relevant statutory laws and the developing common law are discussed. We also examine potential employee reactions to such policies by evaluating the reactions of graduate students to six employer policies including weight restrictions, grooming requirements, use of GPS locators, drug testing, ban on off-duty smoking, and email and internet monitoring. Students responded to these policies by determining the reasonable interest of the employer in the behaviors being monitored or controlled and the manner in which policies were implemented. Their comments suggest that employees may accept some level of monitoring or behavioral restrictions if the employer can make a convincing social account of the need for a policy. Additionally, the policy must be clearly communicated and properly implemented. However, restrictions on off-duty behavior were typically poorly received with the exception of illegal drug use.     

Contingent payments in selection contests

The early literature on research contests stressed the advantages of a fixed prize in inspiring R&D effort. More recently the focus has moved towards endogenizing the rewards to research activity in these tournament settings, since this can induce extra effort or enhance the surplus of the buyer. We focus on a research contest as a means of selecting a partner for an R&D enterprise, in an informational setting in which the established providers of R&D services know more about each others’ relative capabilities than does the buyer/sponsor. An alternative use of our model is in choosing between prospective patentees where the Patent Trading Office has less information on the patents than the competitors. This asymmetry creates a source of inefficiency if a rank order contest is used as a selection device; we show how the contest can be modified to improve selection efficiency, while maintaining its simplicity (as only ordinal information is required). The modification that we suggest involves endogenizing the prizes that are awarded contingent upon whether a contestant wins or loses the contest. Furthermore, the payment system and the selection mechanism are detail-free. This paper is part of the project “The Knowledge-Based Society” sponsored by the Research Council of Norway (project 172603/V10).     

Generalized linear mixed models with informative dropouts and missing covariates

Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) are useful in many longitudinal data analyses. In the presence of informative dropouts and missing covariates, however, standard complete-data methods may not be applicable. In this article, we consider a likelihood method and an approximate method for GLMM with informative dropouts and missing covariates. The methods are implemented by Monte–Carlo EM algorithms combined with Gibbs sampler. The approximate method may lead to inconsistent estimators but is computationally more efficient than the likelihood method. The two methods are evaluated via a simulation study for longitudinal binary data, and appear to perform reasonably well. A dataset on mental distress is analyzed in details.     

The Limit Distribution of the Bootstrap for the Unit Root Test Statistic when the Residuals are Dependent

In this article, the unit root test for the AR(1) model with dependent residuals is considered. We adopt a bootstrap procedure to bootstrap the residuals with bootstrap sample size m less than the size n of the original sample. Under the assumptions that m → ∞ and m/n → 0, the convergence in probability of the bootstrap distribution function is established. Research supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 10471126)