The case of the combative CFO

Minute Publishing Chairman and CEO Neil Harcum has a right to be proud of his new national newspaper, America Today. It has won three Pulitzer Prizes and attracted one million readers in just three years of publication. But, as CFO Peter Rawson points out, it's also losing $100 million a year and has broken Minute's 20-year string of earnings gains. In the process, the company has been split between two warring factions: one is backing Harcum and favors continuing the paper. The other agrees with Rawson that the project must be stopped. The board of directors has been assembled to decide the newspaper's fate. In his speech to the board, Rawson says it's time to cut Minute's losses and put an end to America Today. And Wall Street agrees. Several brokerage houses have taken Minute off their buy lists, and rating agencies are about to down-grade the company's debt. "America Today is not a good investment," Rawson argues. "Certainly, it isn't in keeping with our commitment to deliver maximum value to our shareholders." But Harcum thinks Rawson is way out of line. "We cannot allow our bean-counters to set policy," he claims. Harcum sees the newspaper as a product of the future that has created its own market. It's only a matter of time before America Today attracts enough advertising to put it in the black. He has a successful track record, and he doesn't want the board to lose faith in him now.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

An examination of the psychological traits that affect the ability of tax experts to communicate their expertise

Expert systems have become important in taxation. Previous research indicates that the major bottleneck in the development of tax expert systems is the selection of an expert who is able to communicate his or her expertise. This study identifies the psychological traits most likely to affect the ability of tax experts to communicate their expertise and measures these traits in tax experts whose ability to communicate expertise was tested during previous expert systems research. The results of the personality trait and communication competence questionnaires indicate that experts who are introspective, secure and confident doing familiar work, more agreeable and accommodating, and honest with themselves communicate a greater amount of useful knowledge than those without these traits. The study also finds that cognitive style is not a significant factor. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of functional integration on perceived risk and consumer-based brand equity

Consumers today have access to a wide span of corporate information and are increasingly aware of the degree to which the functional areas of marketing and supply chain activities are becoming more integrated. Functional integration involves coordinating supply- and demand-focused activities and is theorized to create two interrelated benefits for consumers: lower perceived purchase risk and, ultimately, higher consumer-based brand equity. Despite an emphasis on the important role of consumers in the functional integration literature, the consumers’ viewpoint is missing. This research addresses this gap using a survey and an experiment to investigate the impact of functional integration on consumers’ perceptions of risk and consumer-based brand equity. Findings suggest that when functional integration acts as a component of brand association, purchase risk decreases and consumer-based brand equity increases. The results can help scholars and practitioners better understand the role of functional integration by advancing the nomological net of brand associations as part of the standard marketing mix.     

Publicly traded versus privately held: implications for conditional conservatism in bank accounting

Compared with privately held banks, publicly traded banks face greater agency costs because of greater separation of ownership and control but enjoy greater benefits from access to the equity capital market. Differences in control and capital market access influence public versus private banks’ accounting. We predict and find that public banks exhibit greater degrees of conditional conservatism (asymmetric timeliness of the recognition of losses versus gains in accounting income) than private banks. We predict and find that public banks recognize more timely earnings declines, less timely earnings increases, and larger and more timely loan losses. Although public ownership gives managers greater ability and incentive to exercise income-increasing accounting, our findings show that the demand for conservatism dominates within public banks and that the demand for conservatism is greater among public banks than private banks. Our results provide insights for accounting and finance academics, bank managers, auditors, and regulators concerning the effects of ownership structure on conditional conservatism in banks’ financial reporting.

Reputation,Information, and Herding in Credit Ratings: Evidence from CMBS

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - We find strong evidence of herding behavior among credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the CMBS market. CRAs are more likely to change their rating if...     

Social capital: reaching out,reaching in

This paper offers a critique of the much-vaunted claims of sports ability to integrate new migrants by generating social capital. By examining a growing literature base alongside new empirical evidence, we explore whether the experiences of new migrants actually reflect the hypothetical claims made by some policy-makers and scholars about the role of sport in tackling exclusion, promoting inclusion and constructing interculturalism. We demonstrate that the claims made about the value of sport are not found in the experiences of most of our respondents from new migrant communities living in Leeds, UK. We question whether sport truly is communicative in the Habermasian sense, contributing to identity projects, and so counsel caution in using it as a panacea to promote belonging and cohesion. This was a purpose for which leisure opportunities seemed more suited (at least for participants) in our research.     

Local Traits and Securitized Commercial Mortgage Default

We expand on the standard commercial mortgage default model and create a new model by looking beyond the usual factors of option value, insolvency, property type, region, originator type, state foreclosure laws and macroeconomic measures. The new model incorporates measures of local economic conditions, specifically MSA-level commercial property market conditions, county level unemployment, and local home price appreciation. We estimate our new model using a dataset containing the performance histories of over 30,000 CMBS loans that were originated between 1998 and 2012. We find that those local trait variables affect the default rate of CMBS loans significantly and provide improved explanatory power over the standard model. We further explore the impact of local home price measures by comparing the explanatory power of lagged and contemporaneous home price indexes, comparing the power of home price indexes at the state, county, and zip-code level, examining the interaction of home price indexes with commercial property type, looking at the impact of home price indexes over time, and at the impact of introducing local commercial land price indexes. We find that local residential house price-related measures provide a high quality and high frequency signal of local market conditions.     

Globalised management and local labour: the case of the white‐goods industry in Turkey

This paper is concerned with the situation where goods are produced by workers in underdeveloped countries, in this case, consumer durables, under the direction of managements which have access to modern management techniques. In particular, it considers the significance of new management methods, especially Total Quality Management, for workers employed in white‐goods manufacture in Turkey.