Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

Migration, Trade, And Development, Federal Reserve Bank Of Dallas, The Tower Center For Political Studies, Southern Methodist University, Department Of Economics At Southern Methodist University, Jno E. Owens Foundation

eBooks

"Migration and trade are more prevalent today than ever before in the history of the world. The United States is the recipient of about one-third of the world’s migrants and accounted for a quarter of the world’s output and 13 percent of the world’s trade in 2005. But the global significance of the U.S. economy is slowly declining, and while the effects of migration and trade on the U.S. economy have been examined time and again, questions concerning the impact of migration and trade on development in low-income countries are of growing importance.

Simple, neoclassical economic models predict that prices …

What Makes For Effective Labor Representation On Pension Boards?, Johanna Weststar, Anil Verma

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This article examines the efficacy of labor representation on pension boards. Using existing literature and interviews with labor trustees, this article develops a model where a more formal approach to recruitment and selection, skill acquisition, and accountability is hypothesized to aid labor trustees in achieving effective integration and representation on pension boards. Data indicate that labor trustees are placed in a challenging environment with insufficient support from their union, other trustees, or the board. These findings have important implications for the selection, training, and integration of labor trustees and the success of a labor agenda on pension issues.

North American Business Strategies Towards Climate Change, Charles Jones, David Levy

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

Business has become a key part of the fabric of global environmental governance, considered here as the network which orders and regulates economic activity and its impacts. We argue that businesses generally are willing to undertake limited measures consistent with a fragmented and weak policy regime. Further, the actions of businesses act to create, shape and preserve that compromised regime. We examine three types of indicators of business responses in North America: ratings by external organizations, commitments regarding emissions, and joint political action. We find business response to be highly ambiguous, with energetic efforts yielding few results.

Japanese Corporate Governance: Structural Change And Financial Performance, Asli M. Colpan, Toru Yoshikawa, Takashi Hikino, Hiroaki Miyoshi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper analyzes institutional and legal changes related to corporate governance and their impact on financial performance in Japan since the second half of the 1990s. We attempt to address two issues systematically: (1) how much the governance reforms of Japanese firms transformed the conventional system of alliance capitalism and managerial control; and (2) what economic outcomes those governance changes have yielded. As the Commercial Code and other legal and institutional frameworks were revised, Japanese firms experienced shifts in terms of stock ownership, corporate control and managerial organizations. Our empirical results show that the influence of new ownership composition and …

The Association Between Corporate Governance And Audit Fees, Cindy K. Harris

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”) established not only corporate governance reform but also legislated significant changes to the practice of auditing publicly held corporations. Rules implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) further reinforced stronger corporate governance standards. The effect of these reforms on the cost of public audits is indisputable: the initial rise in audit fees was dramatic as corporations complied with the new provisions. This paper examines the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and audit fees for a random sample of 100 publicly traded corporations drawn from the 2005 Fortune 500 list. The data is obtained …

To Trust Or To Monitor: A Dynamic Analysis, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In a principal-agent framework, principals can mitigate moral hazard problems not only through extrinsic incentives such as monitoring, but also through agents’ intrinsic trustworthiness. Their relative usage, however, changes over time and varies across societies. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon by endogenizing agent trustworthiness as a response to potential returns. When monitoring becomes relatively cheaper over time, agents acquire lower trustworthiness, which may actually drive up the overall governance cost in society. Across societies, those giving employees lower weights in choosing governance methods tend to have higher monitoring intensities and lower trust. These results are consistent with the …

Fish Behaviour And Welfare, Lynne U. Sneddon

Ethology Collection

Fish are farmed intensively in aquaculture which is an economic necessity to provide large quantities for the food industry yet many species’ normal behaviours may be impaired by the nature of intensive aquaculture. Recommendations have suggested that for optimum welfare, animals should be able to express their natural suite of behaviours. Confining large migratory species such as salmonids to relatively small tanks or cages means they are unable to perform the extensive migrations performed by their wild counterparts so are these fish frustrated? When considering why salmonids migrate, their motivation is to find food yet if they are well fed …

The Impact Of Standardized Testing On Student Performance In The United States, Stephanie Linden

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

In the United States, the current trend in education is the dependence on standardized testing to improve our current education system. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 mandates higher test scores and improved academic performance in schools nation-wide, especially inner city schools. This thesis will attempt to evaluate whether standardized testing and the methods used to assess high performance has helped to create a better education system in the United States, or whether it has hindered student performance. There has been much discussion about this topic, some positive and some not. In this paper I will present both …

Electrochemical Detection Of Prostate Carcinoma Biomarkers Using Nanotechnology, Kathryn Leonard

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

The first chapter of this thesis speaks about prostate specific antigen, carbon nanotubes and horseradish peroxidase. The second chapter discusses the electrochemistry and catalysis of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and myoglobin (Mb) covalently attached to vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays used as a tranducer. Cyclic voltammetry results gave quasi-reversible FeIII/FeII voltammetry and electrochemical catalysis involving catalytic reduction of hydrogen peroxide for both the iron-heme enzymes in myoglobin and horseradish peroxidase coupled to the carboxylated ends of the carbon nanotube arrays by amine bioconjugation reactions. Reduction peak currents gave linear relationships with scan-rates, typical of thin layer voltammetry. Results suggest that the …

Improving Corporate Governance : Character Education As A Supplement To Corporate Ethics Training, Richard L. Muney

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis explores the hypothesis that ethics training for corporate personnel will significantly increase ethical behavior and thereby significantly reduce the incidence of corporate malfeasance.

For over 100 years the federal government has been trying to curb malfeasance by managers of public corporations and their boards of directors. This thesis examines the history of that legislation and those regulatory efforts, concluding that these legislative and regulatory attempts have met with varying degrees of success, but, on balance, that success has been transitory at best. It also comes to the conclusion that corporate training programs in ethics, in the absence of …

Ethics In Business And Government, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Ethics

Bibliography and photographs of a display of government documents from Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Best Practices In Ethical Leadership (Chapter Seven Of The Practice Of Leadership), Craig E. Johnson

Faculty Publications - College of Business

Excerpt: "The arrival of the new millennium brought with it a tsunami of corporate scandals. Just as the publicity from one wave of discredited companies (Enron, World Com, Tyco, Adelphia) subsided, another wave rose to take its place (Health South, Strong Mutual Funds), only to be followed by yet another (Fannie Mae, AIG Insurance). All of these cases of moral failure serve as vivid reminders of the importance of ethical leadership. In every instance, leaders engaged in immoral behavior and encouraged their followers to do the same."

Farm Animal Welfare: In Legislatures, Corporate Boardrooms, And Private Kitchens, Andrea Gavinelli, Miyun Park

State of the Animals 2007

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, globally, approximately 56 billion land animals—including nearly 48 billion broiler chickens— are slaughtered for human consumption in a single year (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2004), in addition to an untold number of aquatic animals. The numbers of individual animals raised and killed by the meat, egg, and dairy industries far surpass the number of animals with whom human beings have any other relationship—whether they be those seen as fabric, target practice, test tubes, companions, or sideshow spectacles.

The Institutional Entrepreneur As Modern Prince: The Strategic Face Of Power In Contested Fields, David Levy, Maureen A. Scully

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This paper develops a theoretical framework that situates institutional entrepreneurship by drawing from Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand the contingent stabilization of organizational fields, and by employing his discussion of the Modern Prince as the collective agent who organizes and strategizes counter-hegemonic challenges. Our framework makes three contributions. First, we characterize the interlaced material, discursive, and organizational dimensions of field structure. Second, we argue that strategy must be examined more rigorously as the mode of action by which institutional entrepreneurs engage with field structures. Third, we argue that institutional entrepreneurship, in challenging the position of incumbent actors and stable …

Sex-Role Orientation, Women As Managers And Transformational Leadership Among Female Law Firm Partners And Subordinates, Nathalie Lynch-Walsh

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

Nearly 30% of all attorneys in the U.S. are women, but only 17% of all partners in major U.S. law firms are women. The disparity in the number of women at the top of the legal profession echoes the shortage of women at the helm of major U.S. corporations. Traditional sex-role stereotypes represent one type of "glass ceiling" barrier and stem from the different behavioral norms assigned to men (agentic) and women (communal) based on relative social status. Women exhibiting nonconforming behavior are less liked than conforming women. Conversely, women exhibiting agentic behaviors such as selfconfidence and assertiveness are seen …

The Legal Framework For Currency Management In Nigeria., Anthony Olatujoye

Bullion

This paper reviews the adequacy of the existing legal framework for Currency Management in Nigeria. The paper is structured into three parts. Part I is an introduction to the paper. The legal provisions governing currency management in Nigeria and some of the legal challenges for the CBN are highlighted and examined in part II. Part III concludes the paper: that a major legal challenge facing the CBN is the absence of specific provisions of the law criminalizing such acts as tampering, deliberate mutilation, spraying and marching of currency.

Perceptions Of Corporate Social Responsibility: An Empirical Study In Singapore; Strategic Management Policy, Gilbert Yip Wei Tan, Rajah Vellan Komaran

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In Singapore, there is no doubt that there have been efforts by various local and foreign corporations to incorporate some CSR principles in their operations. Indeed, there was a national initiative modeled after the tripartite approach to industrial relations where national economic and industrial issues are collectively resolved by the government, employers and employees. Against the backdrop of this national initiative and the effort by some corporations to incorporate CSR principles, not much is really known about the state of affairs in Singapore.

Strategic Investments In Japanese Corporations: Do Foreign Portfolio Owners Foster Underinvestment Or Appropriate Investment?, Parthiban David, Toru Yoshikawa, Murali D. R. Chari, Abdul A. Rasheed

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper investigates the effect of foreign ownership on strategic investments in Japanese corporations. Foreign owners are typically portfolio investors who frequently buy and sell shares and hold diversified portfolios of small stakes in many firms. Prior research has presented two conflicting perspectives on the role of such investors: (a) their frequent trading leads to pressure for short-term returns that fosters underinvestment; (b) their active trading fosters appropriate investments. We investigated the relationship between foreign ownership and strategic investments using dynamic panel data analysis of a sample of 146 Japanese manufacturing firms from 1991 to 1997. We found that foreign …

Animal Welfare Assurance Programs In Food Production: A Framework For Assessing The Options, D. Fraser

Farm Animal Welfare Collection

Various animal welfare assurance programs are being used to encourage or require the adoption of animal welfare standards in food production, and to assure the public that such standards are followed. The programs involve five main formats. Non-mandatory codes/guidelines are relatively easy to institute and appear well-supported by the industry, but provide only minimal assurance to the public unless measures are taken to ensure compliance. Programs based on government regulations and inter-governmental agreements are more challenging to institute; they are likely to generate less industry acceptance, but may provide more public confidence if enforcement is adequate. Product differentiation programs, and …

Stormwater Utility Fees: Considerations & Options For Interlocal Stormwater Working Group (Iswg), New England Environmental Finance Center

Water

Stormwater utilities are a concept whose time seems to have arrived. Established by relatively few communities in the 1970s as a method of funding flood control measures, stormwater utilities now exist in over 400 municipalities and counties throughout the United States. During the next 10 years, their numbers are expected to swell dramatically – by one estimate to over 2,000 by the year 2014.

The reasons for this growth are multifold. Federal stormwater regulations passed in the 1980s (Phase I of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Program, or NPDES), motivated many larger communities to seek alternative funding sources and …

"Offshore” Or “Shorn Off”: The Oecd’S Harmful Tax Competition Initiative And Development In Small Island Economies, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

The difficulties of developing and executing a sustainable development program in Small Island Economies (SIEs) are well documented. Comparatively small domestic markets, remote export markets, a dearth of natural and human resources, susceptibility to environmental change and natural disasters, plus limitations on the state’s capacity to govern economic activity have narrowed the range of feasible development strategies resulting in a reliance on sectors vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global economy.

Who Owns The Medium Owns The Message? The Ambiguity Of The Right To Communicate In The Age Of Convergence, Aliaa Ibrahim Dakroury

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In her essay on The Ambiguity of the Right to Communicate in the Age of Convergence, Aliaa Dakroury frames the issue mediation in terms of media ownership and control. The question asked in the title -- Who Owns the Medium Owns the Message? -- in its rhetorical rather than literal form, indicates the skepticism with which Dakroury approaches too narrow a vision of determination. In the terms of his case study, this means questioning the apparent incommensurability of the economic convergence of multi-national media conglomerates and the right to communicate. To do so, Dakroury offers substantial analyses of both the …

Live Virtual Reference And The Database Dilemma, Jennifer Mcclure

The Southeastern Librarian

Live virtual reference programs in the university setting have blossomed in recent years as librarians have aspired to become as “virtual” as the resources they offer. While some libraries have chosen to limit their service to affiliated members, many have preferred to open their programs to the wider community. The motivation to do so is perhaps particularly strong among public university librarians, who often feel a dual responsibility to their own affiliates and to the citizens of their state. However, the decision to offer a chat reference service to the public raises a number of legal, ethical, and practical questions …

The Impact Of Ownership Structure On Wage Intensity In Japanese Corporations, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan, Parthiban David

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors studied the effect of ownership structure on human capital investments as indicated by wage intensity, defined as the ratio of expenditure on employee wages to sales, in a sample of 996 Japanese manufacturing firms during their economic recession of 1998-2002. They found that domestic shareholders, with interests beyond financial considerations, enhance wage intensity, especially when performance is low, and thereby safeguard human capital investments. Foreign shareholders with sole interest in financial returns have an opposite effect; they reduce wage intensity when firm performance is low.

The Effects Of Ownership And Capital Structure On Board Composition And Strategic Diversification In Japanese Corporations, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The board of directors plays an important role in solving the agency problem between shareholders and management. This paper investigates the relationships between ownership and board structure with the diversification strategy of large Japanese firms. The results show that corporate nominee directors are associated with lower levels of product diversification of their investee firms. This suggests that nominee directors in large Japanese corporations see themselves representing specific interests and therefore investors should pay attention to board composition in order to assess the level of protection they can expect to receive. Even without any apparent agency problem with management, there remains …

Solving The Bargaining Democracy Problem Using A Constitutional Hierarchy Of Law, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

In the “bargaining democracy” groups form coalitions that are able to grant benefits to themselves through legislation. These benefits may lack popular support. A constitutional hierarchy of conflicting laws is proposed to resolve this democratic problem. In the hierarchy more “rule-oriented” legislation dominate. The hierarchy would create a momentum of the political process towards more rule-oriented legislation and policy debate. The difficulty of defining a rule operationally is overcome by limiting the task of a constitutional court to simply rank conflicting policy actions in terms of criteria for rules.

Ownership Structure, Investment Behaviour And Firm Performance In Japanese Manufacturing Industries, Eric Gedajlovic, Toru Yoshikawa, Motomi Hashimoto

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using data spanning the 1996-98 fiscal years of 247 of Japan's largest manufacturers, we empirically evaluate the extent to which a firm's investment behaviour and financial performance are influenced by its ownership structure. To do so, we examine six distinct categories of Japanese shareholders: foreign investors, investment funds, pension funds, banks and insurance companies, affiliated companies and insiders. Our findings strongly indicate that the relationship between the equity stakes of a particular category of investor and a firm' s financial performance and investment behaviour is considerably more complex than is depicted in simple principal-agent representations. Such a result emphasizes the …

The Relationship Between Governance Structure And Risk Management Approaches In Japanese Venture Capital Firms, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan, Jonathan Linton

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper attempts to understand what drives Japanese venture capital (JVC) fund managers to select either active managerial monitoring or portfolio diversification to manage their firms' investment risks [J. Bus. Venturing 4 (1989) 231]. Unlike U.S. venture capitalists that use active managerial monitoring to gain private information in order to maximize returns [J. Finance 50 (1995) 301], JVCs have traditionally used portfolio diversification to attenuate investment risks [Hamada, Y., 2001. Nihon no Bencha Kyapitaru no Genkyo (Current State of Japanese Venture Capital), Nihon Bencha Gakkai VC Seminar, May 7]. We found that performance pay is positively related to active monitoring …

Social Trust And Economic Governance, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper investigates the dynamic relationship between social trust and economic governance using a principal-agent model with stochastic returns. To mitigate the inherent moral hazard problem both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives are useful. The cooperative tendency of an agent measures his intrinsic discipline against shirking, the distribution of which characterizes social trust in society. The economic governance methods include direct monitoring and efficiency wage. The main results are the following. An agent with a higher cooperative tendency needs less monitoring and a lower wage to make effort, which brings higher profit for the principal. But competition among principals for more …

Ua3/9/2 Subject File - Athletics - Administration: Big Red - Gabibbo, Wku President's Office - Ransdell

WKU Administration Documents

Entire folder of correspondence regarding Big Red and Gabibbo from 1991-2004 housed in WKU President's Office subject files.