Should governments mandate more female board representation? Possible intended and unintended consequences

Using data on more than 4,000 product recalls, we recently found that firms whose boards of directors include more women are significantly faster to recall dangerously defective medical products. More specifically, adding just one female director to a board with no women did not speed recalls, but increasing from one female director to two, from two to three, and so on led to increasingly faster recalls. This provides initial evidence that consumer safety can be improved through including more women on companies’ boards. Assuming data from other settings support our findings, it is tempting to conclude that governments should mandate a certain level of female board representation, especially for firms in consumer product sectors such as medical devices, food, toys, and automobiles. We suggest, however, that policy makers need to carefully think through the possible intended and unintended consequences of dictating board composition in terms of gender. Meanwhile, wise companies will recognize the benefits of greater female board representation and will pursue it without government intervention.     

From risk to vulnerability: the role of perceived adaptive capacity for the acceptance of contested infrastructure

Infrastructure projects such as repositories for nuclear waste or hazardous waste sites impose risks (in the form of potential burdens or losses) over extensive timescales. These risks change dynamically over time and so, potentially, does their management. Societies and key actors go through learning processes and subsequently may be better able to deal with related challenges. However, social scientific research on the acceptance of such projects is mainly concerned with (static) risk perception issues and does not include dynamic aspects. Adaptive capacity, which is part of the concept of vulnerability, therefore represents a promising complementing facet for this line of research. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of perceived adaptive capacity (PAC) for the acceptance of contested long-term infrastructure for the two issues of nuclear and hazardous waste. In an online experimental survey (N?=?300) examining either the acceptance of a nuclear waste repository or of a hazardous waste site, we demonstrate that (i) PAC can be separated empirically as a psychological construct from risk and benefit perception, and (ii) PAC explains a significant additional share of variance in the acceptance of both waste types beyond risk and benefit perception. Furthermore, we report what adaptation mechanisms of PAC participants expect to occur in the future. We conclude that such a dynamic perspective yields important insights in understanding individual decision-making regarding long-term infrastructure projects.     

The Institutionalization of Fair Trade: More than Just a Degraded Form of Social Action

The context of economic globalization has contributed to the emergence of a new form of social action which has spread into the economic sphere in the form of the new social economic movements. The emblematic figure of this new generation of social movements is fair trade, which influences the economy towards political or social ends. Having emerged from multiple alternative trade practices, fair trade has gradually become institutionalized since the professionalization of World Shops, the arrival of fair trade products in the food industry, and the establishment of an official “fair trade” label. With the strength that this institutionalization has generated, fair trade can now be considered a real trade system that questions, as much as it renews, the traditional economic system. In parallel, this transformation has exacerbated the tensions within the movement, which can be characterized as a clash between a “radical, militant” pole and a “softer, more commercial” one. However, it is not the actual institutionalization of fair trade which is being debated among fair trade actors on either side of the fence, but rather the challenges inherent in finding an economic institutionalization acceptable to social economic movements. Therefore the institutionalization process of fair trade should not be seen as mere degradation of social action, but rather as typical of the institutionalization process of new social economic movements. If we need to worry about the highjacking and alteration of the fair trade movement by the dominant economic system, the opposite is no less likely, as new social economic movements contribute to an ethical restructuring of markets.     

Do Goodwill Impairments by European Firms Provide Useful Information to Investors?

In 2004 International Accounting Standards Board. (2004). International Accounting Standard (IAS) N°36: Impairment of assets. London: Author. [Google Scholar], the IASB adopted the mandatory annual impairment-test-only of goodwill (IAS 36) instead of amortization of goodwill. We present and discuss the academic literature regarding the association between the goodwill impairment, under this new standard, and the revision of investors’ expectations about a company’s future cash flows. The academic literature highlights that, in some specific cases, IAS 36 may help investors to revise their expectations. More precisely, goodwill impairment seems relevant when: (a) there is strong asymmetry of information between managers and investors, (b) managers disclose detailed information in the notes regarding their own assumptions about future cash flows, and (c) managers do not manage earnings and provide reliable information to investors. In many cases, goodwill impairment is probably useless for investors because they are able to revise their expectations based on public information, or because they cannot trust the accounting numbers and additional information in the notes about the impairment test, which are provided by (undisciplined) managers. More research is, however, needed to understand in which circumstances impairment-test-only is more useful, as well in which cases it is less adequate. Our analysis relates to the current post-implementation review and should be useful to standard-setters. Before any modification, we argue that standard-setters should carefully consider the economic and the institutional contexts when issuing a new accounting standard.     

Will the games pay? An event analysis of the 2020 summer Olympics announcement on stock markets in Japan,Spain, and Turkey

As a wealthy, highly developed city with many existing athletic facilities, Tokyo seems uniquely placed to profit from hosting the 2020 Olympics and boost the Japanese economy. We test this hypothesis using event analysis to determine whether the holding period return on Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 stock index showed abnormal returns following the IOC’s announcement that Tokyo would host the 2020 Summer Games. We use the same technique to investigate whether the stock markets in Madrid or Istanbul – the other finalist cities – showed abnormally low holding period returns in the wake of the announcement.     

Financialization,Globalization and the Management of Skilled Employees: Towards a Market‐Based HRM Model in Large Corporations in France

The article analyses the transformation of HRM policies for skilled employees in large corporations in France over the last decade in relation to changes occurring in governance patterns and competitive strategies. First, we highlight a shift towards globalization and financialization in the strategic management of large corporations in France, entailed by the diffusion of a shareholder form of capitalism in that country. Second, we characterize the market‐based HRM model applied to skilled employees under these new strategic orientations and the diversity of ways in which these transformations are perceived depending on employees' age and level of responsibility within the firm.     

Accounting for climate change and the self-regulation of carbon disclosures

Adopting a form of “critical dialogic engagement” (Bebbington et al., 2007), this paper explores how dominant environmental discourses can influence and shape carbon disclosure regulation. Carbon-related disclosures have increased significantly in the last five years, and many of these disclosures remain voluntary. This paper considers both the construction of self-regulated carbon disclosure practices and the role that this kind of carbon information may have in climate change-related decision making. Our preliminary findings indicate that the methodological diversity underpinning carbon disclosures may inhibit the usefulness of climate change-related data. To explore these issues, this paper focuses on the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the use of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol as a reporting model within it.