Business Commons^™

Work-Based Social Support In The United States: Limits And New Possibilities, Heather Boushey, Chris Tilly

Center for Social Policy Publications

The U.S. social policy framework has always relied on private employers to fill in the gaps for workers, rather than the state. U.S. workers have neither a strong social safety net outside of the labor market, nor an extensive social welfare structure supporting the labor market. For the most part, adequate provision of social benefits depends critically on employers’ voluntary adoption of support policies. For example, the U.S. has neither a universal health plan nor a requirement that employers provide health insurance coverage; the U.S. public system of old-age pensions is work-based, and that public system falls short unless supplemented …

An Overview Of The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards At The Bottom Of America’S Labor Market, Annette Bernhardt, Heather Boushey, Laura Dresser, Chris Tilly

Center for Social Policy Publications

When we talk about the “gloves-off economy,” we are identifying a set of employer strategies and practices that either evade or outright violate the core laws and standards that govern job quality in the U.S. While such strategies have long been present in certain sectors, such as sweatshops and marginal small businesses, we argue that they are spreading. This trend, driven by competitive pressures, has been shaped by an environment where other major economic actors—government, unions, and civil society—have either promoted deregulation or been unable to contain gloves-off business strategies. The result, at the start of the 21st century, is …

Young Professionals And Philanthropy, Patricia Neilson

Emerging Leaders Program Team Projects

Seven teams of young professionals presented what they learned from their projects with 7 organizations from the nonprofit and donor sector over the past year. Their experiences and insights address two related questions:

• What is the role of philanthropy in retaining young professionals in the Boston region?

• How can young professionals leverage their leadership skills, and their organization’s resources, to create successful partnerships in philanthropy to serve the Boston region?

Building Trades Apprentice Training In Massachusetts: An Analysis Of Union And Non-Union Programs, 1997-2007, Anneta Argyres, Susan Moir

Labor Resource Center Publications

This study provides an analysis and comparison of the efficacy and sustainability of union and non-union building trades apprentice training programs in Massachusetts. The authors analyzed several outcome variables including total enrollment levels and completion rates; enrollment and completion rates for minorities, women and other non-traditional populations; and program size and sustainability. Based on the findings, the authors offer recommendations to the Massachusetts Division of Apprentice Training.

The Globally Responsible Leader, Bertha-Lucia Fries

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

In recent years there has been a dramatic expansion of what I call Global Responsibility (GR)-a new dynamic force for change in business, government, and other organizations. GR integrates into one inclusive model the emergent ("fragmented") models generally known as: Business Ethics, Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Eco-Efficiency, Ethics and Development, Sustainable Development, The Best Company to Work For, and others. This unprecedented change, rather than spearheaded internally by management, is pioneered externally by the stakeholders of organizations-including consumers, investors, media, activists and concerned citizens. They are progressively putting more pressure on organizational leaders to change both how companies …

Discontinued Sec Required Disclosures: The Value Of Repairs And Maintenance Expenditures Using A Variance Decomposition Approach, Bruce K. Behn, Richard Riley, Giorgio Gotti, Richard C. Brooks

Financial Services Forum Publications

On December 13, 1994, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) eliminated certain schedules that included repairs and maintenance (R&M) disclosures previously required in annual reports and registration statements filed with the SEC. The purpose of this research is to determine if market participants utilized R&M information when making investment decisions. Resulting from a variance decomposition approach, the findings indicate that market participants did use R&M disclosures in their investment decisions. Thus, as a possible policy implication of this research, the SEC may want to reconsider the decision to eliminate the required R&M expenditure disclosures.

Conditional Conservatism In Accounting: New Measure And Tests Of Determinants, Giorgio Gotti

Financial Services Forum Publications

Following Basu’s (1995, 1997) seminal work, accounting literature adopted the Basu coefficient to measure conditional conservatism (among others, Ball et al. 2003; Ball et al. 2000; Ball et al. 2005; Ball and Shivakumar 2005; Lobo and Zhou 2006; Chandra et al. 2004). However, Basu’s choice of proxy for measuring the arrival of good/bad news, stock returns, introduces inaccuracy in the measure of conditional conservatism (Dietrich et al. 2007; Roychowdhury and Watts 2007; Givoly et al. 2007).

To address the problem, I introduce a new measure of conditional conservatism, which results from a Least Absolute Deviation (LAD) piecewise regression and adopts …

An Analysis Of The Levels And Patterns Of Shareholder Rights: 1990 - 2006, Lal Chugh, Joseph W. Meador

Financial Services Forum Publications

Greater attention is being paid to the issue of shareholder rights and corporate governance, particularly since the scandals of 1990s and 2000s and the stock market decline of the new millennium. This study advances the concept of an optimum level of shareholder rights in corporate governance and analyzes the long-run trends in shareholder rights versus management entrenchment, using the G-Index. This study finds that the level of shareholder rights generally has not increased, despite the legislative and regulatory reforms of the 2000s and contrary to the general perception. Rather, shareholder rights have declined amongst the large, S&P 500 companies. The …

Changing Patterns Xiv: Mortgage Lending To Traditionally Underseved Borrowers & Neighborhoods In Boston, Greater Boston And Massachusetts, 2006, Jim Campen

Gastón Institute Publications

This is the fourteenth in the annual series of Changing Patterns reports prepared for the Massachusetts Community & Banking Council (MCBC) by the present author. This year’s report, for the first time, includes the analysis of subprime lending that was previously presented in a separate annual series of Borrowing Trouble reports. The report presents information for the city of Boston, for Greater Boston, and for Massachusetts, as well as for each of the state’s fourteen counties and each of its thirty-three largest cities and towns.

The analysis is based on federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data for 2006, as …

The Effect Of Corporate Governance Regulatory Intervention On Firm Decisions And Market Reactions, The Italian Case, Giorgio Gotti, Stacy R. Wade

Financial Services Forum Publications

This paper investigates whether Italian companies that cross-list in the United States between 1993 and 2005 show (i) a change in their internal policies as anticipated by the bonding hypothesis, (ii) an increase in market value, or (iii) an increase in the access to capital funds. We use the unique environment created by the 1998 Draghi reform which significantly improved the protection of Italian listed companies’ minority shareholders and we further examine the impact of legislated changes in corporate governance in Italy on the decision of Italian companies to cross-list in the United States.

Our results indicate that following the …

Entrepreneurship As Emergence, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

Emergence is at the core of entrepreneurship research, which has explored the coming-intobeing of opportunities, new organizations, re-organizations, and new industries, agglomerations, and so on. Emergence is also at the theoretical core of complexity science, which is essentially dedicated to exploring how and why emergence happens in dynamic systems (like entrepreneurship). This exploration begins by defining Opportunity In-tension as a dynamic interplay of personal agency and perceived opportunity, which is a catalyst for entrepreneurial behavior. Then I propose two insights about emergence, based on recent research in complexity science. First, a process theory for emergence is presented, which integrates Gartner’s …

The State Of New England: Economic Slowdown And Recovery After The Dotcom Bust, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, College Of Management, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Financial Services Forum Publications

What follows is an analysis of the key macroeconomic trends in the six New England states. Using data publicly available in 2007, we examine trends in GDP growth, population, personal income and unemployment rate in each state. We provide a breakdown of each state by GDP category and provide an overall weighting by super sectors.

A Scale-Free Theory Of Emergence: Four Sequences Of Emergence Within, Of, And Across Organizations, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

Emergence – the “coming into being” of new processes, structures and entities – is a consequential phenomenon that management scholars have been exploring since Babbage (1832) described the emergence of a division of labor, and Weber (1947) explained the emergence of bureaucratic hierarchy. Emergence is important and unique not only because it occurs at multiple levels within and across organizations, but also because emergence is the process that creates new “levels” of organizing (McKelvey & Lichtenstein, 2007).

Staff Management In Emergency Evacuation Preparedness And Response, Davood Golmohammadi Phd

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Political Contestation In Global Production Networks, David Levy

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This paper develops a critical framework on international management and production that draws from the literatures on global commodity chains and global production networks (GPNs), from institutional entrepreneurship, as well as from neo-Gramscian theory in international political economy. The framework views GPNs as integrated economic, political, and discursive systems, in which market and political power are intertwined. The framework highlights the contingent stability of GPNs as well as the potential for actors to engage politically in contestation and collaboration over system governance and the distribution of benefits. The framework offers a multidimensional and multi-level approach to understanding power relations, ideology, …