Particle production in strong interactions

Imperial Users onl

Choice as Regulatory Reform: The Case of Japanese Corporate Governance

In this paper, we examine a unique recent approach to corporate governance reform in Japan. The reform permits firms to switch from “Japanese” to “U.S” board structure, featuring independent committees of the board for audit, compensation, and nomination. We examine the first year of adoptions (the 2003 annual shareholders meeting season) in this natural experiment, frame hypotheses concerning why Japanese firms might make the switch, and conduct an event study to assess the hypotheses in light of the market’s reaction to firm announcements of the decision to switch. We conclude with an intellectual roadmap for future reform of Japanese corporate governance, highlighting a potential shortcoming in the new board option

Sovereign Wealth Funds and Corporate Governance: A Minimalist Response to the New Mercantilism

Keynes taught years ago that international cash flows are always political. Western response to the enormous increase in the number and the assets of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), and other government-directed investment vehicles that often get lumped together under the SWF label, proves Keynes right. To their most severe critics, SWFs are a threat to the sovereignty of the nations in whose corporations they invest. The heat of the metaphors matches the volume of the complaints. The nations whose corporations are targets of investments are said to be threatened with becoming sharecropper states if ownership of industry moves to foreign-government absentee holders. More tempered critics fear that SWFs will make decisions for political, not economic reasons. Calls for both domestic and international regulation of sovereign wealth funds\u27 investments are now a daily occurrence. In this Article we frame a minimalist response to concerns over SWFs. The high profile controversy over the rise of SWFs is one – but only one – of the frictions that result from the interaction of two very different conceptions of the role of government in a capitalist economy – state capitalism as opposed to market capitalism. In the form of market capitalism that has developed in the advanced economies, to be sure with fits and starts, the individual company is the unit whose value is maximized. Prohibitions against government subsidies and preferences reflected in WTO and European Union rules are designed to prevent governments from shifting the level of profit maximization from the company to the state. In contrast, some major developing countries (China foremost among them) increasingly reflect a form of state capitalism – what we call the new mercantilism. In this form, the country is the unit whose value is to be maximized, with a corresponding increase in the role of the national government as a direct participant in and coordinator of the effort. For the developed economies, the belief that free trade and competition amongst companies increases GDP at the national level is an article of faith: the market polices the tautology. For developing economies, particularly those whose enterprises must compete with companies from more advanced economies, the state, acting through SWFs, through direct ownership of operating companies, and through regulation, seeks to level the playing field. For the new mercantile capitalism, the government attempts to ensure that company-level behavior results in country-level maximization of economic, social, and political benefits

F. Hodge O\u27Neal Corporate and Securities Law Symposium: Path Dependence and Comparative Corporate Governance

The study of institutions, and particularly the study of institutions that societies use to govern business enterprises, is at a point of transition. In the last two or three decades, scholars focusing on economic principles to define appropriate legal rules and corporate institutions rose up to challenge the traditional orthodoxy of corporate governance found in the Berle and Means corporation. One of the most exciting trends in the literature rests upon the increasing marginal returns school of economics associated with Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute. The traditional neoclassical economic theory of production, familiar from decades of undergraduate and graduate courses in microeconomic theory, focuses on competition between products in terms of decreasing marginal returns. The idea is that the economy will settle to a competitive (and optimal) equilibrium at the point where the decreasing marginal returns that sellers can obtain from increasing production just equal the increasing marginal costs of producing more and more units of a given product. As a producer increases the amount of production of a given product, it must sell to purchasers less excited about the product. Demand for additional units decreases, which in turn decreases marginal revenue

Shifting Influences on Corporate Governance: Capital Market Completeness and Policy Channeling

Corporate governance scholarship is typically portrayed as driven by single factor models, for example, shareholder value maximization, director primacy or team production. These governance models are Copernican; one factor is or should be the center of the corporate governance solar system. In this essay, we argue that, as with binary stars, the shape of the governance system is at any time the result of the interaction of two central influences, which we refer to as capital market completeness and policy channeling. In contrast to single factor models, which reflect a stable normative statement of what should drive corporate governance, in our account the relation between these two governance influences is dynamic. Motivated by Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, we posit that all corporate governance systems undergo repeated shifts in the relative weights of the two influences on the system. Capital market completeness determines the corporate ownership structure and privileges shareholder governance and value maximization by increasing the capacity to slice risk, return, and control into different equity instruments. The capability to specify shareholder control rights makes the capital market more complete, tailoring the character of influence associated with holding particular equity securities and its reciprocal, the exposure of management to capital market oversight. Policy channeling, the real government’s instrumental use of the corporation for distributional or social ends, pushes the corporate governance gravitational center toward purposes other than maximizing shareholder value. We show that this pattern is not limited to a particular country, and illustrate our argument by tracing the cyclical reframing of Berle and Means’ thesis in the U.S., Japan’s sluggish shift from policy channeling in its postwar heyday toward capital market completeness under the Abenomics reforms, and the distinctive case of China, where capital market completeness has itself been used as a policy channeling instrument under the pervasive influence of the Chinese Communist Party, creating the world’s most stakeholder-oriented system of corporate governance. We close by examining the means through which the current shift toward policy channeling in U.S. and U.K. corporate governance is taking place – the “stewardship” movement and the debate over “corporate purpose.” We view both as a reaction to the reduced managerial discretion caused by the reconcentration of ownership in the hands of institutional investors, and analyze factors suggesting that this reform movement, like others before it, is likely destined to result in a disappointment-driven shift in the opposite direction, what we label a shifting influence

Foreword: Path Dependence and Comparative Corporate Governance

This symposium issue of the Washington University Law Quarterly focuses the application of path dependence to corporate institutions on a natural topic: comparative corporate governance

Effects of Differing Education Levels on Respiratory Therapy Hiring Decisions in Pennsylvania

Many healthcare professions struggle with knowing what the entry-level educational requirement should be for their profession. This study looked at the educational level of hiring managers for respiratory therapy and whether that affected their decisions on hiring associate or baccalaureate degree graduates in the state of Pennsylvania. The quantitative internet-based questionnaire surveyed respiratory therapy hiring managers in hospitals in Pennsylvania. The power theory, with the use of expert power, organizational culture and change, and ethnographic principle, was used to examine how hiring managers choose their employees. An invitation was sent to 70 respiratory hiring managers in Pennsylvania to participate on the internet-based survey. The results showed a statistically significant finding using a Chi-Square analysis that the hiring managers in Pennsylvania prefer to hire associate degree graduates compared to baccalaureate degree graduates [X2(2, N = 58) = 7.52, p = .023]. There were also statistically significant findings using a Spearman’s correlation, that associate degree graduates and baccalaureate degree graduates possess all 69 competencies as outlined by the AARC 2015 and Beyond initiative [rs (57) = 1, p = \u3c.001]. The last piece of statistically significant finding was that the Covid-19 pandemic did not change the minds of hiring managers on the entry-level of the profession [X2(1, N = 58) = 7.66, p = .006]. The implications for positive social change are that the current entry-level practice is meeting the needs of employers in Pennsylvania and allows for less barriers to diverse individuals that are seeking to gain a college education and a career in healthcare

National Preferences in Business and Communication Education: A Survey Update

This article discusses the results of a survey in the U.S. regarding national preferences in business and communication education. From the results of this and the previous study, it appears that the skills most valued in the contemporary job-entry market are communication skills. The skills of listening, oral communication (both interpersonal and public), written communication and the trait of enthusiasm are indicated to be the most important. Again, it would appear to follow that university officials wishing to be of the greatest help to their graduates in finding employment would make sure that basic competencies in oral and written communication are developed. Courses in listening, interpersonal, and public communication would form the basis of meeting the oral communication competencies. One way to meet the written communication expectation would be to include courses in rhetorical and business writing. Further, training in interviewing skills would be in order to help university graduates maximize their appearance and personality projection as well as gather information necessary for appropriate decision making