Monitoring the grasslands of Western Australia

Station owners are encouraged to install networks of monitoring sites on their properties. Monitoring takes the guesswork out of remembering how the land is changing. An understanding of the changes to pasture and soil is vital for successful management of the rangeland

Bank ownership, privatization, and performance: evidence from a transition country

This paper combines the static effect of ownership and the dynamic effect of privatization on bank performance in China over 1995-2010, reporting a significantly higher performance by private intermediaries – joint stock commercial banks and city commercial banks – relative to state-owned commercial banks. However, publicly traded banks, subject to multiple monitoring and vetting in capital markets, perform better regardless of ownership status. The privatization of banks has improved performance with respect to revenue inflow and efficiency gains in the short- or long-run (initial public offerings). The positive long-run effect is more relevant and significant for banking institutions with minority foreign ownership. Moreover, this paper innovatively estimates interest income efficiency and non-interest income efficiency at the same time. The results suggest that Chinese banks are much more efficient in generating interest income than raising non-interest revenue, although the latter aspect has improved significantly during the sample period

Implementing the New UN Corporate Human Rights Framework: Implications for Corporate Law, Governance and Regulation

The UN Framework on Human Rights and Business comprises the State’s duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and the duty to remedy abuses. This paper focuses on the corporate responsibility to respect. It considers how to overcome obstacles, arising out of national and international law, to the development of a legally binding corporate duty to respect human rights. It is argued that the notion of human rights due diligence will lead to the creation of binding legal duties and that principles of corporate and tort law can be adapted to this end. Furthermore, recent legal developments accept an “enlightened shareholder value” approach allowing corporate managers to consider human rights issues when making decisions. The responsibility to respect involves adaptation of shareholder based corporate governance towards a more stakeholder oriented approach and could lead to the development of a new, stakeholder based, corporate model

Do private equity target firms exhibit less effectual governance structures?

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. We investigated the unique corporate governance structure of Australian private equity target firms to establish the disciplinary motive underpinning a corporate buy-out and tested our expectations using a sample of 43 publicly listed private equity target firms and a control sample of 182 conventional corporate targets, matched by year and industry, for the period 2001–2010. The findings provide evidence of a less effectual corporate governance structure for private equity target firms. In particular, our analysis reveals that, relative to our benchmark sample, private equity target firms have larger boards, more board meetings and a greater inside ownership. Similarly, our results show that the probability of a firm being a private equity target increases with board size, percentage of insider directors, board meetings and CEO ownership. Consistent with results from work elsewhere, private equity target firms appear to perform ex post reactive monitoring roles rather than ex ante proactive roles