Cleaning Corporate Governance

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced. We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding eighty percent in the G-Index, the most widely used proxy for “good governance” in law and finance. Correcting these errors substantially weakens one of the most well-known results in law and finance, which associates good governance with higher investment returns. Second, we make our corpus freely available to others, in hope of providing a long-overdue resource for traditional scholars as well as those exploring new frontiers in corporate governance, ranging from machine learning to stakeholder governance to the effects of common ownership. Third, and more broadly, our analysis exposes twin cautionary tales about the critical role of lawyers in empirical research, and the dubious practice of throttling public access to public records

Special Libraries, August 1974

Volume 65, Issue 8https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1974/1006/thumbnail.jp

Using Semantic-Based User Profile Modeling for Context-Aware Personalised Place Recommendations

Place Recommendation Systems (PRS's) are used to recommend places to visit to World Wide Web users. Existing PRS's are still limited by several problems, some of which are the problem of recommending similar set of places to different users (Lack of Personalization) and no diversity in the set of recommended items (Content Overspecialization). One of the main objectives in the PRS's or Contextual suggestion systems is to fill the semantic gap among the queries and suggestions and going beyond keywords matching. To address these issues, in this study we attempt to build a personalized context-aware place recommender system using semantic-based user profile modeling to address the limitations of current user profile building techniques and to improve the retrieval performance of personalized place recommender system. This approach consists of building a place ontology based on the Open Directory Project (ODP), a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing websites. We model a semantic user profile from the place concepts extracted from place ontology and weighted according to their semantic relatedness to user interests. The semantic user profile is then exploited to devise a personalized recommendation by re-ranking process of initial search results for improving retrieval performance. We evaluate this approach on dataset obtained using Google Paces API. Results show that our proposed approach significantly improves the retrieval performance compare to classic keyword-based place recommendation model

Federal Register

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii

The Role of the Expatriate Business Community in Rebuilding a State After Forced Failure A Case Study of Iraq

More than 14 years after the U.S.-led invasion and the collapse of the state in 2003 Iraq’s performance in social and physical reconstruction remains poor and hindered by numerous obstacles. The political culture in Iraq particularly suffers from excessive foreign influence, extreme corruption and self-serving political culture, exacerbating social problems in a now-heavily divided society. Long-established power blocs are heavily entrenched within a sectarian division of power in Iraqi governance and independent actors including the Iraqi expatriates, the private sector and civil society groups are heavily impeded from introducing change to the established order. This thesis reviews the background and progress of Iraqi reconstruction efforts since 2003 to highlight factors that contribute to this situation. It uses existing Iraq-specific literature to highlight spaces where alternative political and civil society actors could help change the country’s political culture. Comparative examples from other post-conflict societies (including Lebanon, Afghanistan and Germany) are used to show how expatriate communities, particularly those involved in private enterprise can contribute to post-conflict reconstruction and improving governance in failed or fragile states. The researcher’s extensive personal experience and a case study of the Iraqi Business Council in Jordan comprise the majority of primary research. Comparative case studies show that the private sector capabilities and the international experience gained by expatriates can contribute positively to the reconstruction of their war-torn societies. The thesis highlights opportunities to increase the input of these expatriate business communities in reconstructing Iraq. With the war on ISIS now subsiding, Iraq faces a new chapter of challenges mainly in reconciliation, reinstating refugees, rebuilding an investment-based economy, fighting corruption and injustice. All these major challenges require sincere and genuine effort to engage the business community inside and outside Iraq. Therefor the importance of this thesis comes from its focus on the above challenges