1,720,957 research outputs found
Agency problems of corporate philanthropy
No full textEvaluating agency theory and optimal contracting theory views of corporate philanthropy, we find that as corporate giving increases, shareholders reduce their valuation of firm cash holdings. Dividend increases following the 2003 Tax Reform Act are associated with reduced corporate giving. Using a natural experiment, we find that corporate giving is positively (negatively) associated with CEO charity preferences (CEO shareholdings and corporate governance quality). Evidence from CEO-affiliated charity donations, market reactions to insider-affiliated donations, its relation to CEO compensation, and firm contributions to director-affiliated charities indicates that corporate donations advance CEO interests and suggests misuses of corporate resources that reduce firm value
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Essays in corporate governance
No full textThe dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay finds that corporate giving is associated with CEO characteristics, but not with measures of firms most likely to benefit in terms of increased profitability. This result is robust to a natural experiment and holds even among firms that are most likely to benefit from corporate giving. Analysis of firm value shows that shareholders discount the equity value of cash for firms making large charitable contributions. To examine when corporate giving represents an agency problem, I focus on CEO preferences, stock price reactions to the initial disclosure of corporate giving where executives and directors have personal interests, corporate contributions to company-sponsored foundations where shareholders lose their claims to these often sizable assets, the relation between CEO compensation and corporate giving (presuming it is a perquisite), and strategic uses of corporate giving that build CEO social ties with the independent directors. My results indicate that CEOs advance their personal interests when firms contribute and suggest that the value reduction is due to managerial misuse of corporate resources. In the second essay, I use a 2009 Delaware case law as a natural experiment to examine the effect of officers’ fiduciary duties (OFDs) on corporate acquisition decisions. I find that acquirers whose officers were protected from market discipline prior to 2009 experienced increased announcement-period abnormal stock returns after the event, mainly because post-event acquisitions by these firms created more synergies and reduced officers’ control. I also find that OFDs are more important in firms where officers have wealth risk, face less product market competition or are insulated from the market for corporate control. These results suggest that OFDs are a critical corporate governance mechanism that works in tandem with other disciplinary mechanisms. In the third essay, I use natural disasters as potential shocks to firm-specific performance and find that the compensation of both CEOs and non-CEO top executives is asymmetrically adjusted for exogenous changes in firm-specific performance. The results are robust to the inclusion of several corporate governance measures, supporting the hypothesis that asymmetric pay-for-performance sensitivity is a result of implicit incentives
Does corporate ownership impact the probability of informed trading?
Full text linkAs individuals or families hold a substantial share of a firm at the cost of less diversified portfolio, they specialize their portfolio and have better inside information. Does the market marker react to this fact and maintain higher level of asymmetric information cost for such family-controlled firms? We analyze the bid-ask spread and the probability of informed trading (PIN) of Canadian-based publicly traded firms cross-listed with NYSE/AMEX to test this notion. We find that although the market maker maintains higher average spread, he does not form higher PIN for family-controlled firms when the entire day is considered as an event period. The assumption of constant arrival rates of informed and uninformed traders during the day in Easley et al (1996b) is rejected in the two periods per day analysis. In addition, the notion of information event occurrence prior to the day in Easley et al (1996b) is consistently rejected as higher (non-statistically) probability of information events is found in the afternoon (second session) in the two (three) periods per day analyses, respectively. Based on these findings, we have serious doubts about any existing findings (including ours) of PIN based on one period per day. As such, we consider the possibility of several periods per day.Though it remains an empirical question to choose how many periods should be considered, we find our results using two and three periods per day to be very interesting. We consistently reject the hypothesis that the PIN is higher for family-controlled firms. Since the market maker does not need to maintain high spread for firms with very high number of uninformed traders and very low number of informed traders, we do not perceive our findings to be either surprising or contradictory to the present literature. By developing a different formulation of PIN, we also show that this is empirically less than that developed by Easley et al (1996b)
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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