Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

The Volkswagen Scandal, Britt Blackwelder, Katerine Coleman, Sara Colunga-Santoyo, Jeffrey S. Harrison, Danielle Wozniak

Robins Case Network

Volkswagen is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world. For years the company has focused on producing attractive and environmentally friendly automobiles, and recent initiatives have included a project to reduce CO² production, along with advertisements claiming lower emission of greenhouse gases. The world was shocked to hear that Volkswagen had been producing diesel engines for its cars that were able to trick emissions testing equipment. The engines were producing many times the EPA standards for emissions, yet they passed emission tests. This case provides detailed information about the scandal as well as information about the history, …

Huntington Coin Collection And Donation Protection, Zhengcheng Li

MA Projects

Mr. Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955) was one of the greatest collector and donor in American history at the early 20th century. He was the founder of Hispanic Society of America and the president of American Numismatic Society. During his lifetime, he set up one of the most important Hispanic coin collection and donated all these coins to Hispanic Society of America in the meanwhile loaned to American Numismatic for study and research purpose. After he passed by, at 2008 Hispanic Society of America sued against America Numismatic Society for getting back the Huntington coin collection with other related documents and …

Disciplining Corporate Boards And Debtholders Through Targeted Proxy Access, Michelle M. Harner

Indiana Law Journal

Corporate directors committed to a failed business strategy or unduly influenced by the company’s debtholders need a dissenting voice—they need shareholder nominees on the board. This Article examines the biases, conflicts, and external factors that impact board decisions, particularly when a company faces financial distress. It challenges the conventional wisdom that debt disciplines management, and it sug-gests that, in certain circumstances, the company would benefit from having the shareholders’ perspective more actively represented on the board. To that end, the Article proposes a bylaw that would give shareholders the ability to nominate direc-tors upon the occurrence of predefined events. Such …

Taxation As It Relates To Politics, Small Business & Corporate America, Elizabeth Assaf, Rebecca Wuorio

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Raj Rajaratnam: Cheater (Revised), Alicia Baker

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

No abstract provided.

Corporate Social Responsibility/Sustainability Reporting Among The Fortune Global 250: Greenwashing Or Green Supply Chain?, John K. Lewis

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

The sustainability reporting efforts of MNCs who are members of the Fortune Global 250 (FG250) was investigated. The focus was on sustainability reporting by MNCs of supply chain impacts. The reporting of FG250 MNCs was examined to determine if greenwashing was occurring or whether MNCs had committed to operating a green supply chain. A mixed methodology was used consisting of quantitative analysis of twenty-five MNC CSR/sustainability reports which were randomly selected from the FG250 listing. Qualitative analysis using content analysis was also conducted on the reports. Both methodologies concentrated on the sustainability reporting of the selected MNCs in regard to …

The Effects Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Financial Performance, Marly Mentor

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Companies have taken the initiative to be socially responsible over the years. In the past, the focus for companies has been on maximizing wealth. With the growth of corporate social responsibility (CSR), there has been many debates regarding its benefits. More companies are beginning to realize the value of being socially responsible and how critical it is to business function. This paper researches past studies on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial performance. This relationship is then tested using a reliable source of data on corporate social responsibility performance. This study uniquely looks at the accounting and market-based …

Correlates Of Ethical Sensitivity And Reasoning And Their Potential Influence On Accounting Education, Michael Francis Ruff

2016

This dissertation consists of three studies investigating the impact of accounting ethics interventions on graduate students in accountancy. This dissertation relies primarily on neo-Kohlbergian theory and Rest’s framework of ethical behavior (Rest 1979, 1986) because this framework has figured prominently in the body of accounting and auditing research on ethics and professionalism.

The first study reviews and synthesizes the current state of the literature regarding accounting ethics. This literature review starts with definitions and follows with a history and evolution of ethics theories, with an emphasis on neo-Kohlbergian theory, Rest’s Four Component Model of ethical behavior, the Defining Issues Test …

Three Empirical Studies Of Internal Audit Quality, Steven M. Desimone

2016

This dissertation contains three studies that examine the IAF’s role in corporate governance, factors that lead IAFs to take a deliberate approach to improve IAF quality, and how IAFs influence financial reporting quality in the public sector.

The first study examines factors that are associated with IAF involvement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) auditing. Results suggest that organizations with more formally documented corporate governance guidance and IAF guidance are more likely to engage their IAFs in CSR auditing than those without such documentation. Findings also indicate that IAFs of governmental organizations and those within larger organizations engage in significantly more …

Perceptions Of Cause-Related Marketing Tactics, Robert Bernier

White Papers

Study of small business owners in Nebraska reveals reluctance to make judgements about tactics intended to manipulate customers and more certainty about genuine charitable actions.

Lurkers, Creepers, And Virtuous Interactivity: From Property Rights To Consent To Care As A Conceptual Basis For Privacy Concerns And Information Ethics, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Exchange of personal information online is usually conceptualized according to an economic model that treats personal information as data owned by the persons these data are ‘about.’ This leads to a distinct set of concerns having to do with data ownership, data mining, profits, and exploitation, which do not closely correspond to the concerns about privacy that people actually have. A post-phenomenological perspective, oriented by feminist ethics of care, urges us to figure out how privacy concerns arrive in fundamentally human contexts and to speak to that, rather than trying to convince people to care about privacy as it is …

He Said , She Said: The Rcbc Money Laundering Scandal, Leveric T. Ng

Graduate School of Business Publications

The ongoing RCBC money laundering investigation has evidently become a topic of conversation from New York to Singapore…….That should come as no surprise given the magnitude of the crime, but unfortunately not many people here seem to have grasped yet just how damaging this is to the country. The sad reality is that the all-too-typical way this scandal is being addressed only serves to camouflage the relatively simple, broad facts of the case, and almost certainly won’t lead to the swift decisive solutions the country needs to implement to avoid becoming a financial pariah.” (Ben Kritz, Manila Times March 18, …

Brokers And Investment Advisors, Nathaniel Phillip Graham

Theses and Dissertations--Finance and Quantitative Methods

Brokers and investment advisors are a large and important part of the financial industry. Using a novel data set that includes the majority of the financial advisory industry, in this dissertation I document the size of the financial advisory industry and the prevalence of customer complaints in the industry, which I use as a proxy for misconduct. I then test for two potential drivers of advisors’ misconduct: professional standards in the form of fiduciary responsibilities and influence from social networks. I find that variation in fiduciary duties—specifically fiduciary versus suitability standards— does not appear to affect advisors’ propensity for misconduct. …

A Modular Governance Architecture In-The-Making: How Transnational Standard-Setters Govern Sustainability Transitions, Stephan Manning, Juliane Reinecke

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

Sustainability transitions have been studied as complex multi-level processes, but we still know relatively little about how they can be effectively governed, especially in transnational domains. Governance of transitions is often constrained by the equivocality of sustainability goals, the idiosyncrasy of niche experiments and the multiplicity of governance actors and interests. We study the role of transnational standard-setters in mitigating these challenges and governing sustainability transitions within a transnational sector. Our case is the global coffee sector where ‘sustainability standards’ are increasingly being adopted. We find that the emergence of a ‘modular governance architecture’ has helped diverse and heterogeneous actors …

An Integrative Framework Of Buyer–Supplier Negative Relationship Quality And Dysfunctional Interfirm Conflict, Melvin Prince, Dayananda Palihawadana, Mark A. P. Davies, Robert Winsor

Marketing & Business Law Faculty Works

Purpose: Problems of relationship quality and interfirm conflict in business-to-business settings are serious concerns that need to be addressed. Thus, the authors have engaged in an extensive review to promote an understanding of these complex issues. This article develops an integrated framework for analyzing wide-ranging relations between individual representatives and patterns of interfirm incompatibility for managerial control.

Methodology/approach: The review involves numerous sources that include articles and monographs. A theoretical framework is constructed to integrate fragmented empirical data. In particular, social identity and commitment-trust theories are mobilized for this framework.

Findings: The review of studies has a substantial consistency with …

The Shareholder Value Of Empowered Boards, K.J. Martijn Cremers, Simone M. Sepe

Journal Articles

In the last decade, the balance of power between shareholders and boards has shifted dramatically. Changes in both the marketplace and the legal landscape governing it have turned the call for empowered shareholders into a new reality. Correspondingly, the authority that boards of directors have historically held in U.S. corporate law has been eroded. Empirical studies associating staggered boards with lower firm value have been interpreted to favor this shift of authority, supporting the view that protecting boards from shareholder pressure is detrimental to shareholder interests. This Article presents new empirical evidence on staggered boards that not only exposes the …

Ethical Considerations Facing The Regulation Of Self-Driving Cars In The United States, Richard Mancuso

CMC Senior Theses

Self-driving cars are here. Once an advanced technology that seemed futuristic, they are now closer than most believe. Many of the largest automobile manufacturers are working on autonomous vehicle technology of their own. Perhaps most well-known, though, are the cars being developed by Tesla and Google. Both companies have well-developed prototypes of fully autonomous vehicles, meaning they require no human input or supervision, and Tesla has promised widespread, consumer availability of this technology in the next one to two years.

Along with the availability of this technology to the public and transportation companies like Uber and Lyft, comes a need …

Proximity To Children: A Geospatial Approach To Understanding The Relationship Between Fast Food And Schools, Andrew Atwong

CMC Senior Theses

In a time when Americans are waking up to the health consequences of consuming fast food, researchers have discovered that fast food restaurants seem to be located in greater concentrations near primary or secondary schools. While this phenomenon affects the food environments of some children and carries implications as to their short term and long term health (which has also been well researched), this paper focuses primarily on fast food restaurants that are within walking distance of schools. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to integrate geospatial, business, demographic, and food quality data, I use linear regressions to examine whether and …

The Effect Of Increased Regulation On Option Use Within The Information Technology Industry, Ahmed H. Eltamami

CMC Senior Theses

Exorbitant executive compensation packages have drawn large criticism from the public eye and with the recent financial crisis and the previous tech bubble opinion on executive incentives has forced government institutions to respond. Over the past two decades the SEC and FASB have aimed to respond to the public and with three large regulation changes in the 2000s, pay for performance compensation has gone through many changes. In this study I build on previous work in an attempt to answer whether or not executives within the Information Technology industry have seen a larger decline in option compensation when compared to …

The Sacrificial Ram, Charles Ebbers

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Every January and February, Montana and other western states auction tags to hunt big horn sheep, moose, mountain goats, bears and other big game species to the highest bidder, at a series of hunting shows in Nevada. Some states call them “governor’s tags,” while others like Montana call them auction tags.

The purpose of the auctions is to raise funds for state conservation programs meant to keep wildlife populations healthy. In Montana, the funds raised are species specific, meaning that the proceeds from a bighorn sheep tag must be used to help bighorn sheep. Yet, the revenue from these tags …