并购交易中的金降落伞计划

对于即将奔赴海外进行并购的中国企业而言,必须仔细审视这些“金降落伞”计划是否会加大收购成本或增加目标公司现金支出从而阻碍购并。     

Home Warranties: An Analysis of an Emerging Development in Consumer Protection

Although warranty coverage on consumer products is a universally accepted form of protection, the extension of similar coverage to buyers of new and used homes is a developing practice. Home warranties serve a dual purpose: they reduce a homebuyer's risk of substantial financial loss, and protect the builder, seller or real estate vendor from legal liability should undisclosed material defects occur after a sale. In an effort to examine consumer reactions to home warranties, a mail survey was conducted of recent purchasers residing in four central counties of New York State. It was found that two-thirds of the 571 single-family homeowners who responded were aware of warranties on new housing and 97 percent were in favor of such coverage. Only 22 percent were aware of warranties for resale homes and 56 percent favored such coverage. Unexpected defects costing more than $100 were experienced by 55 percent of the sample. However, only 27 percent of the sample had defects which were warrantable under most current warranty programs.     

CEO career horizon,corporate governance,and real options: The role of economic short‐termism

Research Summary: Combining studies on real options theory and economic short‐termism, we propose that, depending on CEOs’ career horizons, CEOs have heterogeneous interests in strategic flexibility, and thus, have different incentives to make real options investments. We argue that compared to CEOs with longer career horizons, CEOs with shorter career horizons will be less inclined to make real options investments because they may not fully reap the rewards during their tenure. In addition, we argue that long‐term incentives and institutional ownership will mitigate the relationship between CEOs’ career horizons and real options investments. U.S. public firms as an empirical setting produced consistent evidence for our predictions. Our study is the first to theoretically explain and empirically show that a CEO's self‐seeking behavior will impact real options investments. Managerial Summary: This article helps to explain how a CEO's self seeking‐behavior may shape a firm's real option investment, which could result in different level of strategic flexibility. We argue that CEOs with short career horizons have less time to exercise their firms’ real options, which should lower the investments in the firms’ real options portfolios relative to CEOs with long career horizons. We study a sample of U.S. public firms and find strong evidence that a CEO's expected tenure in the firm is positively related to the real options investments at the firm level. We find that this agency issue can be mitigated by adopting appropriate corporate governance mechanisms such as long‐term incentives and institutional investors.     

Optimal taxation and growth with public goods and costly enforcement

This paper studies optimal direct and indirect taxation in an endogenous growth framework with a productive public good and costly tax collection. Optimal (growth-maximizing) tax rules are derived under exogenous collection costs. The optimal direct–indirect tax ratio is shown to be negatively related to the administrative costs of collecting these taxes, as documented in cross-country data. This result also holds under endogenous collection costs (with these costs inversely related to administrative spending on tax enforcement), but for these to generate significant effects on tax collection requires implausibly high degrees of efficiency in spending, or the allocation of a large fraction of resources to tax enforcement. Depending on how it is financed, the latter policy may entail adverse effects on growth. Improving ‘tax culture’ and the sense of civic duty through greater budgetary transparency may be a more effective policy to improve tax collection and promote economic growth.     

William F. Whyte: Contributions to management

The name of William Foote Whyte is most frequently associated with Street Corner Society, the sociological study of life in Boston's North End during the late 1930s, but his research spanned another sixty years in a range of settings on three continents. This article traces his achievements over the decades, as he developed and applied a participatory action research methodology in the kitchens of Chicago restaurants, the oilfields of Oklahoma and Venezuela, subsistence farms in Peru and Guatemala, and industrial cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. It describes how this methodology, grounded in case research, led to social change at the “Tremont Hotel” in a Midwestern city. It questions why his achievements have not received greater recognition among by academicians and practitioners, perhaps because his ideas and findings on social change produced discomfort among peers and the sponsors of his research.