Anxiety of dependency in international joint ventures? An empirical study of drivers and consequences of relationship insecurity

This research introduces and delineates the concept of insecurity in IJV relationships. We define relationship insecurity as a parent firm's concerns about the continuance of the alliance arrangement and its partner's future provision of need satisfaction. According to interdependence theory, exchange partners that experience high dependence inevitably experience this ‘anxiety of dependency’, and the emergence of insecurity can destabilize the working relationship from within. We develop a conceptual model of the drivers and consequences of relationship insecurity in IJVs. Our survey results from 125 IJVs indicate that focal firm dependence and partner firm dependence both negatively affect insecurity, though the former is the dominant predictor. This surprising finding implies IJV partners experience ‘anxiety of low dependency’. The results suggest insecurity not only reduces directly IJV performance, but also lowers the quality of interpartner communication, which in turn dampens performance. Implications of these results are discussed.     

Technology and Rights

What do we know about technology and rights? This article provides a fairly comprehensive overview of current issues regarding this topic. We explore and analyse a wide spectrum of rights that are challenged in this current era of technological convergence. We use the United States Bill of Rights as an example of the vulnerability of legal protections for rights against particular political and technological changes in this post 9-11 climate. New streams of rights acting as a safeguard against further incursions of technology into civil liberties are explored. We also address intellectual property rights and international trends in copyright, patent and trademark laws. We question whether these issues of technology and rights have a place in current technological literacy scenarios.     

Ownership structure and the pricing of discretionary accruals in Japan

This paper examines the valuation effect of discretionary accruals for Japanese firms, taking into account the book value of equity. Consistent with US evidence, the Japanese market prices discretionary accruals, indicating that discretionary accruals enhance the value relevance of reported earnings. This value relevance is lower for cross-held firms, consistent with the view that cross-business shareholding aggravates tunneling or managerial opportunism through discretionary accounting choices. On the other hand, foreign shareholding and bond financing provide effective monitoring on managerial discretion of profit firms to enhance the valuation of discretionary accruals.     

Interest rate rules and price determinacy: The role of transactions services of bonds

Interest rate rules have been associated with price indeterminacy when they do not respond aggressively enough to inflation. Price indeterminacy is typically associated with indeterminacy of real bond balances, suggesting that the missing element is a meaningful role for government bonds. We assume that government bonds provide arbitrarily small transactions services and show that this can dramatically change the local and global determinacy conditions. In particular, the specification of fiscal policy affects the aggressiveness with which monetary policy must respond to inflation to deliver local determinacy—a range of passive monetary policies, even an interest rate peg, may yield determinacy.     

The consequences to analyst involvement in the IPO process: Evidence surrounding the JOBS Act

The JOBS Act allows certain analysts to be more involved in the IPO process, but does not relax restrictions on analyst compensation structure. We find that these analysts initiate coverage that is more optimistically biased, less accurate, and generates smaller stock market reactions. Investors purchasing shares following these initiations lose over 3% of their investment by the firm's subsequent earnings release. By contrast, issuers, analysts, and investment banks appear to benefit from this increased bias, as optimism is more positively associated with proxies for firm visibility and investment banking revenues when analysts are involved in the IPO process.     

THE EFFECTS OF MUTUAL FUNDS ON M&A COMPENSATION

Motivated by shareholders’ interest in combating executive wealth expropriation through the merger and acqusition (M&A) process, we study how mutual funds influence firm behavior around an acquisition through votes against management proposals. We find that mutual funds reduce the chief executive officer's ability to extract rents during the M&A process by voting against management‐sponsored compensation proposals after the acquisition, thus lowering both excess compensation and increasing pay‐for‐performance sensitivity. Furthermore, mutual fund voting magnifies the impact on negatively performing firms and firms with a larger amount of the mutual fund's holdings in the firm.     

New development: Unified scores of governance capacity using a Bayesian latent variable analysis

A plethora of governance measures has been developed to assess governance capacity in different countries. Choosing one indicator over another involves discretionary decision issues. This article presents a new unified measure of governance capacity for the administrative and political dimensions. The unified measure provides a more accurate understanding of governance than single indices.     

Utilising Accounting and Accountants in the Management of Water Efficiency

This paper explores how five Australian organisations utilised accounting techniques and accountants as they developed an increasing focus on water efficiency during a period of drought. In those cases where top management were responsive to developing community logics that argued for the importance of efforts to maximise water efficiency, non‐accountants found space to experiment with a diversity of decision‐useful accounting initiatives. While initially bypassed, accountants ultimately became important for their ability to link evolving initiatives to core organisational concerns. Alternatively, in those organisations where senior responsiveness to evolving community concerns about water efficiency was limited, accountants dominated from the outset, presiding over a limited range of responses that offered an appearance, but little substance, of change.