Designing long-term disability plans: tax efficiency vs. maximizing wage replacement

The tax treatment of long-term disability plans raises difficult questions for employers and employees, as it necessitates a tradeoff between tax efficiency and maximizing wage replacement for disabled workers. By using simplified case examples, this article illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of different plan design choices. The authors conclude that, in most cases, long-term disability coverage should be mandatory but that employees should be given the choice to decide whether their coverage is taxable.     

Business groups and the incorporation of firm-specific shocks into stock prices

Firm-specific information has a damped effect on business group-affiliated firms’ stock prices. Such firms’ idiosyncratic stock returns are less responsive to idiosyncratic commodity price shocks than are the idiosyncratic returns of otherwise similar unaffiliated firms in the same country and commodity-sensitive industry. Using global commodity shocks means we assess responses to common idiosyncratic shocks of the same magnitude, frequency, and observability. Further identification follows from difference-in-difference tests exploiting successful and matched exogenously failed control block transactions. We conclude that business group firms’ stock prices provide less firm-specific information to capital providers and managers.     

A multidimensional scale for measuring business ethics: A purification and refinement

Many researchers in the field of business ethics have attempted to develop methods to determine and evaluate the ethics of a variety of different classes of people, including students, professionals, and mixed samples of students and professionals. Unfortunately, most of these studies were disjunctive, simply adding confusion to an already unfocused area of research. However, Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990), have changed this trend by attempting to quantify the various ethical philosophies into a multi-dimensional scale of business ethics. This paper examines the background of the Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990) scale — including the authors' findings, empirically tests the scale, and concludes that the scale needs further refinement. A promising result is a model with four dimensions: a broadbased ethical judgment dimension, a deontological judgment dimension, a teleological judgment dimension, and a social contract dimension.Randall S. Hansen is ABD at Florida State University, where his major is marketing and his support area is strategic management. His research interests are directed toward the applied areas of managerial and consumer ethical decision-making as well as strategic issues in social responsibility. He has published in theProceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science, Proceedings of the Southern Marketing Association, andProceedings of the Southern Management Association.     

Market-focused management: Human resource management implications

Under market-focused management (MFM) the whole organization is engaged in the satisfaction of customers' needs—so much so that MFM becomes the philosophy and modus operandi of doing business and customers become the reason for the organization's existence. If this is to happen, human resource philosophies, policies, and practice must be conducive to MFM. The objectives of this article are to briefly review the implications for human resource management. The merits of adopting the business philosophy of MFM as compared to other traditional alternatives have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Webster, 1992; Day, 1990; Kohli and Jaworski, 1990; Narver and Slater, 1990; Grover, 1995). Here we focus on describing human resource philosophy, policies, and practices options that are affected by MFM.     

Financial Services Industry PAC Contributions and Senate Committee Membership

This paper explores the relationship between relevant senate committee membership and campaign contributions from financial services industry political action committees (PACs) from 1998 to 2002. Since this was a period of significant legislative activity affecting the industry, it provides a fruitful time period to investigate the relationship between contributions and committee membership. It is found that membership on the Senate Banking Committee is consistently related to contributions from financial services PACs. Membership on the Senate Finance Committee is related to PAC contributions from some sectors of the industry for some time periods. It is also found that contributions are significantly higher for those senators facing re-election in the particular election cycle. The importance of relevant committee membershipto PAC contributions in the senate is consistent with previous work dealing with the House.     

Debt, Operating Margin, and Investment In Workplace Safety

We investigate how a firm's financial performance affects workplace safety. We provide empirical estimates of the relationship between a firm's financial condition and its investment in workplace safety using plant-level proxies for safety performance from OSHA records for thirteen large U.S. industries for the period 1972-87. Our results suggest that, at the lowest levels of operating margins, firms with higher operating margins have safer workplaces. Firms with more debt also have safer workplaces, but only when operating margins are relatively low. These results are consistent with a number of theoretical models in which financial factors influence operating decisions.     

Environment,planning processes,and organizational performance of churches

Churches have rarely been the focus of research dealing with strategic management issues, although their impact on individuals, as well as on society as a whole, is equal to or greater than the impact of many business organizations. The study reported herein was designed to fill some of the information void. Data were obtained from a sample of 175 churches, and the relationships of church size and growth to perceptions of the environment and to planning processes were examined. The results indicated that perceptions of the environment, or more specifically the importance of certain environmental factors used in decision-making, were related to the level of planning sophistication. In addition, planning sophistication was found to be related to the size and growth of churches.