Interfaith Spiritual Care Understandings and Practices

Reviewed by Rodney W. Seege

Do Independent Directors Curb Financial Fraud? The Evidence and Proposals for Further Reform

In this article, we argue that the U.S. corporate governance rules put too much faith in the independent board members and insufficient emphasis on the shareholders themselves to control and monitor the top management. Given the agency problem between the board of directors and the shareholders, outside directors can be captured by management, thereby leading to inadequate checks on management. The evidence presented in this paper shows that outside board members do not exercise sufficient controls on the management even when the management has gone awry. To solve this agency problem, we propose increasing the power of the principals: make shareholder resolutions binding on management, require a one share, one vote rule to increase the voting rights of shareholders, as well as give the shareholders the ability to directly nominate and/or actively vote against board members.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139595/1/1352_Schipani_Nov17.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139595/4/1352_Schipani_Aug18.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139595/6/1352_SchipaniOct2018.pdfDescription of 1352_Schipani_Aug18.pdf : Aug 2018 Pre-publication draftDescription of 1352_SchipaniOct2018.pdf : October 2018 revisio

Eliminating Conflicts of Interests in Banks: The Significance of the Volcker Rule

Public policy has been focused on controlling the conflicts of interests in banks for the last eighty-five years with limited success. Banks have a unique place in the economy as intermediaries between investors and companies, allowing them to obtain significant private, proprietary information. Public policy is focused on trying to ensure that banks do not misuse this information for their own benefit to the detriment of their clients. This is a tough task

The Elusive Monitoring Function of Independent Directors

Federal law mandates that audit and compensation committees of public companies be comprised entirely of independent directors. The assumption underlying these legal requirements is that independent directors are more likely to act as monitors of the company’s top management. In this paper, we test this assumption. We conduct our tests by examining the level, direction, and profitability of independent directors’ insider trades and compare these to the trades of other members of top management in firms defending class-action lawsuits. Our evidence indicates that there are no differences between the trading activity of independent directors and other insiders during the class period. Our findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of independent directors’ monitoring role.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145437/1/1384_Schipani.pd

Insider Giving

Corporate insiders can avoid losses if they dispose of their stock while in possession of material nonpublic information. One means of disposal, selling the stock, is illegal and subject to prompt mandatory reporting. A second strategy is almost as effective, yet it faces lax reporting requirements and enforcement. That second method is to donate the stock to a charity and take a charitable tax deduction at the inflated stock price. This “insider giving” is a potent substitute for insider trading. We show that insider giving is far more widespread than previously believed. In particular, we show that insider giving is not limited to officers and directors. Large investors appear to regularly receive material nonpublic information and use it to avoid losses. Using a vast dataset of essentially all transactions in public company common stock since 1986, we find consistent and economically significant evidence that these shareholders’ impeccable timing likely reflects information leakage. We also document substantial evidence of backdating—investors falsifying the date of their gift to capture a larger tax break. We show why lax reporting and enforcement encourage insider giving, explain why insider giving represents a policy failure, and highlight the theoretical implications of these findings to broader corporate, securities, and tax debates

VEGAS: a VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey. IV. NGC 1533, IC 2038 and IC 2039: an interacting triplet in the Dorado group

This paper focuses on NGC 1533 and the pair IC 2038 and IC 2039 in Dorado a nearby, clumpy, still un-virialized group. We obtained their surface photometry from deep OmegaCAM@ESO-VST images in g and r bands. For NGC 1533, we map the surface brightness down to $\mu_g \simeq 30.11$ mag/arcsec$^{2}$ and $\mu_r \simeq 28.87$ mag/arcsec$^{2}$ and out to about $4R_e$. At such faint levels the structure of NGC 1533 appear amazingly disturbed with clear structural asymmetry between inner and outer isophotes in the North-East direction. We detect new spiral arm-like tails in the outskirts, which might likely be the signature of a past interaction/merging event. Similarly, IC 2038 and IC 2039 show tails and distortions indicative of their ongoing interaction. Taking advantages of deep images, we are able to detect the optical counterpart to the HI gas. The analysis of the new deep data suggests that NGC 1533 had a complex history made of several interactions with low-mass satellites that generated the star-forming spiral-like structure in the inner regions and are shaping the stellar envelope. In addition, the VST observations show that also the two less luminous galaxies, IC 2038 and IC 2039, are probably interacting each-other and, in the past, IC 2038 could have also interacted with NGC 1533, which stripped away gas and stars from its outskirts. The new picture emerging from this study is of an interacting triplet, where the brightest galaxy NGC 1533 has ongoing mass assembly in the outskirts.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. High-resolution version of paper is available at the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/preview/VEGAS_IV.pdf?role=persona

Polynomial evaluation over finite fields: new algorithms and complexity bounds

An efficient evaluation method is described for polynomials in finite fields. Its complexity is shown to be lower than that of standard techniques when the degree of the polynomial is large enough. Applications to the syndrome computation in the decoding of Reed-Solomon codes are highlighted.Comment: accepted for publication in Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing. The final publication will be available at springerlink.com. DOI: 10.1007/s00200-011-0160-

Molecular characterization of bacteria associated with the trophosome and the tube of Lamellibrachia sp., a siboglinid annelid from cold seeps in the eastern Mediterranean

Specimens of Lamellibrachia (Annelida: Siboglinidae) were recently discovered at cold seeps in the eastern Mediterranean. In this study, we have investigated the phylogeny and function of intracellular bacterial symbionts inhabiting the trophosome of specimens of Lamellibrachia sp. from the Amon mud volcano, as well as the bacterial assemblages associated with their tube. The dominant intracellular symbiont of Lamellibrachia sp. is a gammaproteobacterium closely related to other sulfide-oxidizing tubeworm symbionts. In vivo uptake experiments show that the tubeworm relies on sulfide for its metabolism, and does not utilize methane. Bacterial communities associated with the tube form biofilms and occur from the anterior to the posterior end of the tube. The diversity of 16S rRNA gene phylotypes includes representatives from the same divisions previously identified from the tube of the vent species Riftia pachyptila, and others commonly found at seeps and vents