Concerns of the ceo

Interviews with 26 CEOs across a wide variety of industries reveals their concerns as well as agenda and behavior. The issues discussed have been placed against four intellectual frameworks to get a better picture of CEO concerns. These executives frequently ponder institutional and corporate strategy but very seldom business strategy and competitive markets. The plurality of the concerns deal with issues of management development and human resource management. Where the question is one of changing or redirecting the strategy of the firm, it is often put in the context of looking inside the firm at top managers and organization culture.     

EQUITY-SENSITIVE INDICATORS OF LIVING STANDARDS WITH AN APPLICATION TO NORTHERN IRELAND

The level of a region's achievement with respect to a particular outcome is usually measured by the mean value of that outcome. This, however, ignores the fact that the distribution of that outcome, between population or geographical subgroups in that region, may be unequal: in order to reflect this inequality, ‘equity‐sensitive’ indicators make a downward adjustment to the mean value of the outcome. This paper extends the notion of ‘equity‐sensitive’ indicators which take cognisance of inter‐group inequality, to ‘equity‐sensitive’ indicators which paid heed to intra‐group inequality. It constructs – using data from a Northern Ireland survey into poverty and social exclusion conducted in 2002/2003 –‘equity‐sensitive indicators’ of living standards in Northern Ireland. These take account of both the average level of the standard of living and also inequality in these levels between groups, and between persons in these groups.     

REGULATORY THREATS AND POLITICAL VULNERABILITY

During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign and immediately after, the pharmaceutical industry was subjected to regulatory threats. It was charged with high drug costs, high advertising expense, and insufficient expenditure on research and development (R&D) to develop better drugs. We examine whether firms' measures of political vulnerability (higher advertising expense and lower R&D expenditure) influence the equity value effects of the regulatory threats. We find negative announcement effects around three regulatory threats. We then extend the analysis and find evidence consistent with our hypotheses that measures of political vulnerability are associated with more negative abnormal returns in response to the regulatory threats. JEL classification: G18, L50, L65.     

Smallholder timber sale decisions on the Amazon frontier

We use data from a survey of 2401 households living along the Transamazon highway to study timber sales decisions of smallholders settling in Amazon native forests. We develop an econometric approach, to study both the decision to harvest timber and the volume of timber sold, that corrects for limited access to loggers leading to possible selection bias, incomplete labor markets, and differences in property rights regimes that characterize the area. We find that, irrespective of distance to markets, smallholders that have either been settled by INCRA or have access to credit are more likely to sell wood, but those with outside income sources are less likely to sell. Higher timber prices decrease the likelihood of timber sales. The results suggest that timber sales are viewed only as a means for smallholders to reduce immediate cash constraints. With some exceptions these results hold across property rights regimes.