Dividend policy of Indonesian listed firms: The role of families and the state

We investigate factors influencing the dividend policy of the listed Indonesian firms by focusing on agency costs and ownership structure. Our study finds that firms with higher conflicts of interest among managers and shareholders pay lower dividends. In the context of the conflicts of interest among major and minor shareholders, we find that such conflicts would exert little impact on dividend payments. Further, we find that the family-controlled firms prefer to pay less dividends whereas the corporations with higher state ownership are associated with larger dividend payments. Our findings are in line with the argument that the Indonesian state consider corporate dividends as one of the main sources of revenues other than corporate taxes in their government budget. This issue may have adverse effects on the growth of cash-constrained small and medium-sized enterprises

Minority and Women Entrepreneurs: Building Capital, Networks, and Skills

The United States has an enviable entrepreneurial culture and a track record of building new companies. Yet new and small business owners often face particular challenges, including lack of access to capital, insufficient business networks for peer support, investment, and business opportunities, and the absence of the full range of essential skills necessary to lead a business to survive and grow. Women and minority entrepreneurs often face even greater obstacles. While business formation is, of course, primarily a matter for the private sector, public policy can and should encourage increased rates of entrepreneurship, and the capital, networks, and skills essential for success, especially among women and minorities. In particular, this discussion paper calls for an expanded State Small Business Credit Initiative and an enlarged and permanent New Markets Tax Credit to encourage private sector investment in new and small businesses. These capital initiatives should be complemented with new federal support for local business networks, and for local skills acquisition initiatives, to make it more likely that small businesses will form, survive, and grow. For the United States to continue to grow, to innovate, and even more importantly to generate jobs, we need to expand our rate of business formation and improve the prospects for survival and growth of young and small businesses. Increasing the rate of minority and female entrepreneurship may help to reduce the race and gender wealth gaps, to reduce income and wealth inequality, and to increase social mobility. With the United States becoming more heterogeneous, increasing business formation by minority and female entrepreneurs is critical to improving the rate of entrepreneurship overall. Thus, if we are to grow as a country, create jobs, and make progress on correcting income and wealth inequality, we need to help minority and female entrepreneurs succeed

In re Silicon Graphics Inc.: Shareholder Wealth Effects Resulting from the Interpretation of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act\u27s Pleading Standard

This Article presents an empirical study of changes in shareholder wealth resulting from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in In re Silicon Graphics Inc. Securities Litigation, which interpreted the pleading provision established in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the Reform Act ). Congress passed the Reform Act as part of an ongoing effort to protect corporations from abusive suits alleging fraud by hindsight. In such suits, plaintiffs claimed that a sudden drop in a company\u27s stock price was evidence that the issuer and its management covered up the bad news that led to the price drop. The Reform Act discourages such suits by requiring complaints alleging fraud to state with particularity facts giving rise to a strong inference that the defendant acted with the required state of mind. Courts have interpreted the Reform Act\u27s pleading standard in diverse ways. The Ninth Circuit\u27s interpretation in Silicon Graphics is the most stringent, requiring plaintiffs to allege facts that would show the defendants were deliberately reckless in making the misrepresentation that gave rise to the fraud claim. This pleading standard allows courts to dismiss fraud suits at an early stage if the court deems they lack merit, but it also increases the risk courts will dismiss meritorious suits as well

Journal Productivity in Fishery Science an informetric analysis

Knowledge is a human resource which has the ability to consolidate the valuable results of human thinking and civilization through different times. It is the totality of understanding of nature and its features for improved quality of life of human society. Because of this, knowledge has been increasing in volume, dimension and directions. The term ‘information’ and 'knowledge' are often used as if they are interchangeable. Information is ‘potential knowledge‘ which is converted into knowledge by the integration of memory of human beings. In modern times there is a confusion on knowledge usage. Therefore an understanding of the concept ‘knowledge’ is needed for formulation of strategies in information science

The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How It Can Be Regained

As the U.S. economy struggles to recover from the Great Recession, the erosion of middle-class jobs and the explosion of income inequality have endured long enough to raise serious questions about whether the U.S. economy is beset by deep structural problems. My argument is that the employment problem that the United States now faces is largely structural. But the structural problem is not a labormarket mismatch between the skills that prospective employers want and the skills that potential workers have, as many economists have argued. Nor is the problem automation. Rather, the employment problem stems from changes in the ways that U.S. corporations employ workers as a result of rationalization, marketization, and globalization. Nevertheless, the disappearance of previously existing middle-class jobs does not explain why, in a world of technological change, U.S. business corporations have failed to use their substantial profits to invest in new rounds of innovation that can create new high value-added jobs to replace those that have been lost. I attribute that organizational failure to the financialization of the U.S.corporation. In Part II, I review evidence showing fundamental structural changes that, since the early 1980s, have eroded U.S. middle-class employment opportunities. Then, in Part III, I present evidence that, over the same period, the remuneration of top executives of both industrial and financial corporations has been a major reason for the increasing concentration of income at the top. Part IV discusses the emergence of stock buybacks as a massive and systemic way in which these corporate executives seek to boost their companies’ stock prices, and hence, via stock-based compensation, their own incomes. This Part further identifies how, in many different ways and in many different industries, this financialized mode of corporate resource allocation has undermined the prosperity of the U.S. economy. Finally, I conclude in Part V by identifying the types of changes in the institutional and ideological environment of the United States that are needed to put the nation back on a path to sustainable prosperity

Future Directions in Canadian Tax Law Scholarship

Professor Brooks argues that tax law scholarship should be more relevan4 problem-oriented, and interdisciplinary. He suggests not only that a commitment to the university enterprise demands such scholarship, but also that its production is essential in ensuring that law students are educated in a milieu that provides them with an intellectual base for life-long critical reflectiveness about legal institutions, the profession, and their own work