A demographic decomposition of elderly living arrangements with a Mexican example

Population trends in developing countries raise concern about support for the elderly. The proportion of elderly living with extended kin is an indicator of support. This paper considers the analytic utility of a demographic decomposition of living arrangements of elderly Mexicans into population components which include weights for age and marital composition and corresponding rates or propensities. Separate decompositions for elderly males and females demonstrate the importance of population composition to the makeup of the elderly population who are living with extended kin. The utility of the decomposition for comparative analysis is demonstrated by decomposing gender differences in living arrangements. The higher proportion of women living with extended kin is primarily the result of gender differences in age-specific marital status and only secondarily the results of actual differences in propensities toward this type of living arrangement. The utility and limitations of this analytic tool for comparative research are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42990/1/10823_2004_Article_BF00116824.pd

The impact of board size on firm performance: evidence from the UK

We examine the impact of board size on firm performance for a large sample of 2746 UK listed firms over 1981-2002. The UK provides an interesting institutional setting, because UK boards play a weak monitoring role and therefore any negative effect of large board size is likely to reflect the malfunction of the board's advisory rather than monitoring role. We find that board size has a strong negative impact on profitability, Tobin's Q and share returns. This result is robust across econometric models that control for different types of endogeneity. We find no evidence that firm characteristics that determine board size in the UK lead to a more positive board size-firm performance relation. In contrast, we find that the negative relation is strongest for large firms, which tend to have larger boards. Overall, our evidence supports the argument that problems of poor communication and decision-making undermine the effectiveness of large boards

Signaling about norms: socialization under strategic uncertainty

We consider a signaling model where adults possess information about the dominant social norm. Children want to conform to whatever norm is dominant but, lacking accurate information, take the observed behavior of their parent as representative. We show that this causes a signaling distortion in adult behavior, even in the absence of conflicts of interest. Parents adopt attitudes that encourage their children to behave in a socially safe way, i.e. the way that would be optimal under maximum uncertainty about the prevailing social norm. We discuss applications to sexual attitudes, collective reputation, and trust

An examination of the relationship of governance structure and performance: Evidence from banking companies in Bangladesh

Corporate governance has become increasingly important in developed and developing countries just after a series of corporate scandals and failures in a number of countries. Corporate governance structure is often viewed as a means of corporate success despite prior studies reveal mixed, somewhere conflicting and ambiguous, and somewhere no relationship between governance structure and performance. This study empirically investigates the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and financial performance of listed banking companies in Bangladesh by using two multiple regression models. The study reveals that a good number of companies do not comply with the regulatory requirements indicating remarkable shortfall in corporate governance practice. The companies are run by the professional managers having no duality and no ownership interest for which they are compensated by high remuneration to curb agency conflict. Apart from some inconsistent relationship between some corporate variables, the corporate governance mechanisms do not appear to have significant relationship with financial performances. The findings reveal an insignificant negative impact or somewhere no impact of independent directors and non-independent non-executive directors on the level of performance that strongly support the concept that the managers are essentially worthy of trust and earn returns for the owners as claimed by stewardship theory. The study provides support for the view that while much emphasis on corporate governance mechanisms is necessary to safeguard the interest of stakeholders; corporate governance on its own, as a set of codes or standards for corporate conformance, cannot make a company successful. Companies need to balance corporate governance mechanisms with performance by adopting strategic decision and risk management with the efficient utilization of the organization’s resources

Leadership in agricultural machinery circles: experimental evidence from Tajikistan

Leadership is critical for the viability of rural groups. The way in which leadership is legitimised can mediate leader and group member behaviour in the face of social dilemmas. Yet there has been scant research on leader‐follower dynamics in naturally occurring groups. Highlighting the case of agricultural machinery circles in Tajikistan, the effect of leading by example on investments to a collective good is studied in a framed field experiment. To increase realism, and contrary to standard economic experiments, this investment is a voucher allowing the group to make a real‐world machinery purchase at reduced costs. Two treatments manipulate leaders’ legitimisation. Elected leaders achieve 30 per cent higher contributions to the collective investment against a baseline version without a leader. Contributions remain, on average, relatively stable over the course of the game. The results are discussed with reference to the debate on external intervention in agricultural producer organisations.Peer Reviewe

On intellectual capital efficiency and shariah governance in Islamic banking business model

This paper empirically investigates whether intellectual capital (IC) and shariah governance jointly affect the economic performance of Islamic banks (IBs). In contrast to prior research, this paper disaggregate IC and corporate governance features and examine whether the two are jointly related to economic performance. These relationships are further explored before, during and after the financial crisis based on a sample of 64 Islamic banks operating in different regions during the period 2007–2014. The required data to calculate different constituents of IC efficiency and governance mechanism is hand collected from 512 annual reports. After controlling for other corporate governance and bank‐specific characteristics (operational type, bank size, listing status, risk, type of auditor, accounting standard and region), we find both intellectual capital efficiency and shariah governance proxies (size and dominance of prominent scholars of shariah supervisory board) to have a significant positive relationship with accounting measure of performance. However, based on market performance measure, only one proxy for shariah governance mechanism, that is, prominent scholars on SSB, is found to be significant but in the negative direction. These results provide important insights into the relationship between IC efficiency, corporate governance and performance in Islamic banking business model and have policy and practical implications