Compensation Consultants and Executive Pay (CRI 2009-010)

This chapter provides a review of the recent literature on compensation consultants and executive pay. Six major pay consulting firms dominate the market. These firms advise client firms about executive pay and frequently supply other services such as actuarial work. There is some evidence that CEO pay is higher in firms that use compensation consultants. However, the hypothesis that CEO pay is higher in firms whose consultants face potential conflicts of interest, such as cross-selling of other services, is not as empirically robust

A framework for software reference architecture analysis and review

Premio al mejor artículo, X Workshop Latinoamericano Ingeniería de Software Experimental, ESELAW 2013Tight time-to-market needs pushes software companies and IT consulting firms to continuously look for techniques to improve their IT services in general, and the design of software architectures in particular. The use of soft-ware reference architectures allows IT consulting firms reusing architectural knowledge and components in a systematic way. In return, IT consulting firms face the need to analyze the return on investment in software reference architectures for organizations, and to review these reference architectures in order to ensure their quality and incremental improvement. Little support exists to help IT consulting firms to face these challenges. In this paper we present an empirical framework aimed to support the analysis and review of software reference architectures and their use in IT projects by harvesting relevant evidence from the wide spectrum of involved stakeholders.Award-winningPostprint (author’s final draft

Amalan perkhidmatan perunding pengurusan fasiliti

In most developing countries, Facilities Management (FM) is a new profession. The main dilemma faced by FM is a crisis of identity in which the roles and interests of each party involved in FM market such as FM consulting is difficult to understand by the public. Meanwhile, the services offered by FM consultant also unclear and confusing customers. Therefore, this research is about Standard Practice for FM Consulting Services. The objective of this study was to identify the services offered by FM consultant and to determine the key services to be offered by FM Consultants. The literature review conducted has identified seventeen consulting services offered by FM. Online questionnaire was used to collect the data of the main services offered by FM consultant with respondents from FM consultants firm registered with the MAFM. The analysis used in this research is descriptive analysis using SPSS. The analysis showed that with standard FM consulting services, it can develop best practices among FM consultants and improvements to any of the services offered can be introduced

Inherent Agency Conflict Built into the Auditor Remuneration Model

This paper provides a model for audit market interventions. The study asks whether interventions in the audit market result in excessive premiums at the cost of quality and independence. The model was tested based on a historical data sample of 1,927 companies’ fiscal year financial statements, observed for the period 2010–2013. The testing strategy combined statistical analysis of the market concentration and regression of abnormal results. The findings do not support, for the Polish market, the conclusion that the audit market is used as a leverage for consulting services. This paper discusses possibilities of systematic risk for policymakers as a result of the negative interaction between regulated and non-regulated markets

The Oligopolistic Gatekeeper: The U.S. Accounting Profession

The accounting and financial scandals the last few years not only produced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but have prompted a good deal of debate what forces led to so many dramatic reporting failures. This article is the only work to examine how the competitive structure of the accounting industry contributed to its movement from being a profession to a business that performed auditing. In the article we find not only documentation that the accounting profession is an oligopoly but a sound explanation of how its poor structure contributes significantly to negative social welfare. Throughout the article provides rich support of data to support explanations of the forces that have impacted the accounting profession as well as financial reporting. Most importantly, the article connects how the accounting profession\u27s poor competitive structure likely contributed to the financial and accounting scandals of 2001 and 2002 by making it possible for the mangers of their audit clients to trade off better audits for consulting services. The article also provides insight into weaknesses that continue even after reforms such as those introduced by Sarbanes-Oxley. Several steps to strengthen the accounting industry so that it can return to being a zealous gatekeeper are also proposed in the article

The Emergence of Law Consultants

In this paper we study a slightly subcritical Choquard problem on a bounded domain A. We prove that the number of positive solutions depends on the topology of the domain. In particular when the exponent of the nonlinearity approaches the critical one, we show the existence of cat (A) + 1 solutions. Here cat (A) denotes the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category

Increasing the effectiveness of mergers and acquisitions within the management consulting industry

School of Managemen

Management consulting.

Including a lengthy, comprehensive introduction, this important collection brings together some of the most influential papers that have contributed to our understanding of management consultancy work. The two-volume set encompasses the breadth of conceptual and empirical perspectives and explores those key ideas that have helped to advance our knowledge of this intriguing area. The volumes are divided into a series of thematic sections, affording the reader easy access to a great resource of information. Professors Clark and Avakian have written an original introduction which provides a comprehensive overview of the literature

Selling consultancy services: the Portuguese case in historical and comparative perspective

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Executive Compensation Consultants and CEO Pay

This Article surveys recent empirical studies on the relation between compensation consultants and CEO pay. The economic rationale for using executive compensation consultants is that they supply valuable data, information, and professional expertise to client firms. However, critics argue that the consultant’s independence might be compromised because of conflicts of interest arising from the cross selling of business services or because of the consultant’s desire to obtain repeat business. The emergent empirical evidence suggests that pay consultants are important in explaining executive compensation, although the findings are sometimes mixed and the precise effects of consultants on pay are yet to be fully understood. In addition, this Article provides some new evidence on the correlation between CEO pay and consultants using U.S. and U.K. data. Adopting a slightly different approach to prior studies, I show that there is a positive cross-section correlation between executive pay and compensation consultants. Conditional on the estimation strategy, the existing evidence supports the hypothesis that CEOs of U.K. firms using consultants receive higher pay than those that do not use compensation consultants. There is less evidence that firms facing conflicts of interest, such as supplying other business services, are associated with higher levels of CEO pay. However, the findings may be sensitive to the type of estimation methods employed, and addressing this concern is a challenge for future research. I also find little support for the hypothesis that firms switch consultants as a mechanism of increasing CEO pay. Again, interpreting the data is fraught with difficulties because of selection effects and the possibility of reverse causation. Finally, the recent Dodd-Frank Act significantly upgrades disclosure about executive compensation and compensation advisors. Future research on the efficacy of compensation consultants will undoubtedly take advantage of these new provisions. At present, it is difficult to unambiguously conclude that pay consultants simply promote executive interests at the expense of shareholders, or that pay outcomes and contracts are not optimal