BOARD COMPOSITION FROM A STRATEGIC CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE

This study examined the association between corporations’environments, strategies, and past performance and the composition of their boards of directors as measured by size and outside director representation. The environment, strategy and past performance were viewed as posing a strategic contingency; each of these sets could determine the success or failure of the company. Data on 119 Fortune 500 industrial companies for the 1983-9 period were used. Canonical analysis showed that increased uncertainty of a firm's environment, use of external growth and diversification; reliance on leverage as a means of finance, and poor past financial performance were associated with large board size and increased outside representation in subsequent years. Most important, board composition was positively associated with future measurements of corporate financial performance.     

Classifying nursing home patients; the impact of mid-week data collection on variance reduction.

This study analyzes the variance reduction capabilities of three existing nursing home patient classification systems across different shifts and sub-week time periods. The existing classification systems, all based on nursing time data collected in the middle of the working week, performed well with data collected at night and on weekends. Existing nursing home patient classification systems are robust for time periods other than those during which nursing times have usually been collected.     

Casinos,casino size,and crime: A panel data analysis of Michigan counties

Growth in legal gaming in the United States over the past quarter century or so is well-documented. One important factor fueling this growth was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which permitted Native American tribes to establish, under agreements or “compacts” with the states in which they are located, casinos offering what is known as Class III gaming: slot machines, blackjack, roulette, and other games. Since the passage of the Act, there have been 21 Native American casinos established in Michigan. Also, three non-Native American casinos opened in Detroit in 1999 and 2000. This growth in the number of casinos has sparked a wide-ranging debate over the social and economic impacts of casino development.The purpose of this research is to focus on the crime issue in the broader casino debate. We investigate the impact of these Michigan casinos on the rates of burglary, robbery, larceny and motor vehicle theft (property crimes) in casino host counties as well as in nearby counties. We employ a panel data set with annual observations on all 83 Michigan counties for the period 1994–2010. The dataset includes crime rates taken from the FBI crime data series, variables for the presence of a casino in a county or in a nearby county, the scale of a casino's operations as measured by revenues, and a variety of control variables suggested by the broader literature investigating the factors that determine crime rates generally.Our results suggest that in most cases the property crime rates studied are not affected by the presence or size of a casino in a county or in a nearby county. The largest such impact, which is negative, is for motor vehicle theft. The size of a casino does have a small positive effect on the motor vehicle theft rate.     

Information Disclosure as Environmental Regulation: A Theoretical Analysis

Governments around the world are beginning to embrace a new form of environmental regulation – mandatory disclosure of information. While information disclosure programs appear to have an impact on subsequent firm behavior – often resulting in lower levels of pollution – little is known about the costs and benefits of these programs and whether or not they enhance social welfare. This paper presents a simple bargaining model where mandatory information disclosure is used to overcome a lack of information on the part of the public. We characterize the conditions under which information disclosure will lead to a reduction in emissions, and ultimately, the conditions under which it will enhance social welfare. Several extensions of the model are briefly explored, including the effect of two sources of pollution – only one of which is subject to information disclosure. This paper was prepared while V. Santhakumar was a Visiting Scholar at the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, Vanderbilt University.     

The Optimal Timing of Adoption of a Green Technology

We study the optimal timing of adoption of a cleaner technology and its effects on the rate of growth of an economy in the context of an AK endogenous growth model. We show that the results depend upon the behavior of the marginal utility of environmental quality with respect to consumption. When it is increasing, we derive the capital level at the optimal timing of adoption. We show that this capital threshold is independent of the initial conditions on the stock of capital, implying that capital-poor countries tend to take longer to adopt. Also, country-specific characteristics, as the existence of high barriers to adoption, may lead to different capital thresholds for different countries. If the marginal utility of environmental quality decreases with consumption, a country should never delay adoption; the optimal policy is either to adopt immediately or, if adoption costs are “too high”, to never adopt. The policy implications of these results are discussed in the context of the international debate surrounding the environmental political agenda.      

Corporate social responsibility: attributions,loyalty, and the mediating role of trust

This study investigates whether consumers’ perceptions of motives influence their evaluation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. The study reveals the mediating role of consumer trust in CSR evaluation frameworks; managers should monitor consumer trust, which seems to be an important subprocess regulating the effect of consumer attributions on patronage and recommendation intentions. Further, managers may allay the negative effects of profit-motivated giving by doing well on service quality perceptions. On the other hand, appropriately motivated giving continues to positively affect trust regardless of the performance of the firm on service quality provision.     

Capitalism and democracy in the 21st Century: from the managed to the entrepreneurial economy*

 This paper explains how and why the developed countries are undergoing a fundamental shift away from a managed economy and towards an entrepreneurial economy. This shift is shaping the development of western capitalism and has triggered a shift in government policies away from constraining the freedom of business to contract through regulation, public ownership and antitrust towards a new set of enabling policies which foster the creation and commercialization of new knowledge. The empirical evidence from a cross-section of countries over time suggests that those countries that have experienced a greater shift from the managed to the entrepreneurial economy have had lower levels of unemployment.     

Die Emotionskluft: Wie sich die Printmediennutzung und Gratifikationserwartungen in Einstellungsstrukturen niederschlagenThe emotion gap: How print media usage and expected gratifications influence attitude structures

Regarding formal, linguistic and content-related characteristics, tabloid newspapers have a relatively high potential to emotionally arouse readers, whereas broadsheets present news in a more factual style. In the present study it is argued that the usage of the different types of newspapers affects attitude structures. Specifically, it is assumed that the frequency of usage and expected gratifications during usage have an effect on the affective-cognitive attitude basis. Results of a survey (N = 505) support the hypotheses on the emotion gap: Heavy users of broadsheets base their attitudes on cognitions, regardless of their expected gratifications. For heavy users of tabloid newspapers, expected gratifications moderate the effect of usage on attitude bases: Information-oriented tabloid recipients hold cognition-based attitudes; entertainment-oriented tabloid recipients hold affect-based attitudes.     

Consumer Preferences for Fresh Tomatoes in Benin using a Conjoint Analysis

Constraints related to the technical and socioeconomic aspects of adopting tomato varieties are well documented. However, preferences relating to the demand for this fruit are rarely studied. In fact, demand for the different varieties of tomatoes might be related to consumers’ preferences for the extrinsic (color, size) and intrinsic (taste, nutritive value, water content) characteristics specific to each variety. It is therefore indispensable to determine the characteristics of tomatoes preferred by consumers. We examine consumers’ preferences for tomato attributes among a sample of 600 consumers in four representative markets in the main cities in southern Benin. The study also identifies potential segments of consumers and the market shares of each profile for each segment. The study identifies four potential tomato market segments, two of which have a strong preference for local tomatoes, namely, those that can be conserved for long periods and those with a firm consistency.     

Stochastic Frontier Estimation of Market Power in the Food Industries

We use a modified version of the stochastic frontier model to estimate oligopoly markups above the perfectly competitive frontier, separating out deterministic markups from purely stochastic markups. Using data from 42 US food processing industries between 1990 and 2010, empirical results indicate a widespread incidence of oligopoly power, with Lerner indexes averaging approximately 21%. Further, the estimated markups increase with industrial concentration but decrease with price elasticities and imports. Finally, the estimated Lerner indexes are in the range of previous food industry estimates using New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) models.