Small Employer Perspectives On The Affordable Care Act's Premiums, SHOP Exchanges, And Self-Insurance

Beginning January 1, 2014, small businesses having no more than fifty full-time-equivalent workers will be able to obtain healthinsurance for their employees through Small Business Health OptionsProgram (SHOP) exchanges in every state. Although the Affordable Care Act intended the exchanges to make the purchasing of insurance moreattractive and affordable to small businesses, it is not yet known how they will respond to the exchanges. Based on a telephone survey of 604 randomly selected private firms having 3 -- 50 employees, we found that both firms that offered health coverage and those that did not rated most features of SHOP exchanges highly but were also very price sensitive.More than 92 percent of nonoffering small firms said that if they were to offer coverage, it would be "very" or "somewhat" important to them that premium costs be less than they are today. Eighty percent of offering firms use brokers who commonly perform functions of benefit managers -- functions that the SHOP exchanges may assume. Twenty-six percent of firms using brokers reported discussing self-insuring with their brokers. An increase in the number of self-insured small employers could pose a threat to SHOP exchanges and other small-group insurance reforms

The Simultaneous Disclosure of Shareholder and Stakeholder Corporate Governance Practices and their Antecedents

In making corporate governance (CG) related disclosure, firms may solely focus on shareholders or may broaden their scope of disclosure to serve other stakeholders as well. This study examines whether there are differences in the disclosure of shareholder and stakeholder corporate governance (CG) practices. Based on a hand-collected dataset of 1110 firm-years in South Africa (SA), and a disclosure index using 72 CG provisions from the King III report of CG, we find that the disclosure of stakeholder CG practices is relatively higher than that of shareholder CG practices. Our evidence suggests that foreign ownership, institutional ownership, racial diversity, and gender diversity increase total voluntary disclosure. In contrast, CEO age decreases total voluntary disclosure. Also, whilst foreign ownership, institutional ownership, gender diversity and racial diversity increase both shareholder and stakeholder CG disclosures, CEO age has a negative relationship with both shareholder and stakeholder CG disclosures. Further, board size reduces shareholder disclosure but not stakeholder disclosure. Our results further indicate that, ceteris paribus, the extent of shareholder CG disclosure relative to stakeholder CG disclosure is (1) lower with board size, gender diversity and racial diversity and (2) higher with the level of institutional ownership. Our findings are robust across a raft of econometric techniques