Mutualism, as one of the main types of symbiosis, refers to the reciprocal relationship among rural settlements on the basis of material and information interactions and capitalizing on the ...environments where they are located in. The relationship among rural settlements has long been neglected in the process of rural settlement restructuring. To explore the possibility of integrating mutualism into rural settlement restructuring, an environmental index (EI) was defined to comprehensively evaluate the exterior conditions of rural settlements at a patch level, and two hypotheses were proposed. The first hypothesis postulates that mutualism exists in aggregation area of rural settlement patches with high EI values. The second one suggests that mutualism is present in areas where there are interactions among all the participant settlement patches. Hotspot analysis and component analysis were conducted respectively to obtain mutualistic areas based on the two hypotheses. In the case study of Huangpi, real mutualism was defined based on utilizing people flow data from questionnaire investigation in three towns, and crosstabs analysis and chi-square test were conducted between real mutualism and assumed mutualism developed from the two hypotheses. As results, the second hypothesis was verified. 26 mutualistic areas of Huangpi were identified, and 42 rural settlement patches with a total area of 12.51 ha were decided as relocation settlements. Considering the effects of urban land, serving areas of urban land were derived from accessibility analysis. Intersection of serving areas of urban land and mutualistic areas of rural settlement patches were set to be the prior restructuring direction within a town. Otherwise, two restructuring directions were suggested, including serving areas of urban land oriented and mutualism of rural settlement patches oriented directions. This study contributes to understanding the mutualism among rural settlement patches, and also offers a new perspective to rural settlement restructuring.
•Mutualism exists among rural settlement patches which are located in superior environment with spatial proximity.•Mutualism of rural settlement patches can be identified by component analysis.•Serving ability of urban land affects the restructuring result of rural settlements.•Alternative restructuring plans are developed based on considering mutualism and the effects of urban land.•Intersection of serving areas of urban land and mutualistic areas is identified to be the prior restructuring direction.
This study investigates CEOs’ advice-seeking behavior in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and its influence on managing the financial difficulties these firms face. Grounded in the ...attention-based view of firms, our framework posits that CEOs’ advice seeking plays a sequential role in shaping a firm’s response to financial distress, by influencing CEOs’ awareness of financial difficulties and, subsequently, the restructuring process. We differentiate between advice sought from formal and informal advisors and consider top management team (TMT) functional diversity as a moderator. We test these hypotheses using a proprietary dataset of 407 financially distressed SMEs in France. Our results indicate that advice seeking significantly enhances CEOs’ decision to proceed to restructuring and this effect is mediated by the heightened financial awareness of CEOs. Furthermore, our research highlights the moderating role of the functional diversity of TMT members in the relationship between advice seeking and the restructuring decision.
ABSTRACT
The English hospital sector underwent a major restructuring program between 2000 and 2008 to centralize activity in fewer and larger hospitals. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the ...effects of such consolidations on hospital outputs. As mergers occurred in a staggered way, treatment could start and end at every time and treatment duration varied over the years. As every time is a mix of hospital pre‐treatment, treatment and post‐treatment phases, the canonical difference‐in‐differences assumption of homogeneous policy effects is not only meaningless but also misleading, raising doubts about the appropriateness of the methods previously used in this literature and consequently the accuracy of its results. We instead adopt a new matching and difference‐in‐differences approach, the flexible conditional difference‐in‐differences approach, developed by Dettmann et al. in 2020, more appropriate for causal analysis of treatments characterized by varying start dates and varying treatment duration. Our results suggest that mergers downsize hospital activities, especially the most expensive ones. If the goal of hospital mergers is to gain efficiency by centralization of activity, our findings suggest this restructuring programme is not the most successful policy to pursue. Mergers reduce the scope for competition between hospitals and do not create any incentive for poorly performing hospitals.
•The determinants of firms’ innovation success is examined with firm-level data.•We focus on the effect of organizational and human resource management on product/process innovation.•Product ...innovation is positively correlated with the number of practices implemented.•Personnel assessment reflecting R&D outcomes had a large effects on product innovation.•Drastic organizational change helps to accelerate innovation success.
We examine the determinants of firms’ innovation success, using the firm-level data from the Japanese National Innovation Survey. We focus on the relationship between organizational and human resource management practices for research and development (R&D) and product/process innovation. We find that interdivisional cooperation/teams and the creation/relocation/integration of R&D centers are positively associated with both product and process innovation. Having board members with an R&D background is positively associated with product innovation, implying that top-down R&D decision-making may be important for firms to introduce new products. Among the factors examined, personnel assessment reflecting R&D outcomes appears to have an especially strong relationship with product innovation. Moreover, the positive relationship between the creation/relocation/integration of R&D centers and innovation success suggests that drastic organizational changes can work as a clear signal of firms’ determination to pursue an innovation-oriented strategy and help to accelerate innovation success.
Do Director Elections Matter? Fos, Vyacheslav; Li, Kai; Tsoutsoura, Margarita
The Review of financial studies,
04/2018, Volume:
31, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Using a hand-collected sample of election nominations for more than 30,000 directors over the period 2001–2010, we construct a novel measure of director proximity to elections called ...Years-to-election. We find that the closer directors of a board are to their next elections, the higher CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is. A series of tests, including one that exploits variation in Years-to-election that comes from other boards, supports a causal interpretation. Further analyses show that other governance mechanisms do not drive the relation between board Years-to-election and CEO turnover-performance sensitivity. We conclude that director elections have important implications for corporate governance.
Tone Management Huang, Xuan; Teoh, Siew Hong; Zhang, Yinglei
The Accounting review,
05/2014, Volume:
89, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We investigate whether and when firms manage the tone of words in earnings press releases, and how investors react to tone management. We estimate abnormal positive tone, ABTONE, as a measure of tone ...management from residuals of a tone model that controls for firm quantitative fundamentals such as performance, risk, and complexity. We find that ABTONE predicts negative future earnings and cash flows, is positively associated with upward perception management events, such as, just meeting/beating thresholds, future earnings restatements, SEO, and M&A, and is negatively associated with a downward perception management event, stock option grants. ABTONE has a positive stock return effect at the earnings announcement and a delayed negative reaction in the one and two quarters afterward. Balance sheet constrained firms and older firms are more likely to employ tone management over accruals management. Overall, the evidence is consistent with managers using strategic tone management to mislead investors about firm fundamentals.
Overconfident managers overestimate future returns from their firms' investments. Thus, we predict that overconfident managers will tend to delay loss recognition and generally use less conservative ...accounting. Furthermore, we test whether external monitoring helps to mitigate this effect. Using measures of both conditional and unconditional conservatism respectively, we find robust evidence of a negative relation between CEO overconfidence and accounting conservatism. We further find that external monitoring does not appear to mitigate this effect. Our findings add to the growing literature on overconfidence and complement the findings by Schrand and Zechman 2011 that overconfidence affects financial reporting behavior.
This paper analyzes whether the political connections of listed firms in the United States affect the cost and terms of loan contracts. Using a hand-collected data set of the political connections of ...S&P 500 companies over the 2003–2008 time period, we find that the cost of bank loans is significantly lower for companies that have board members with political ties. We consider two possible explanations for these findings: a Borrower Channel in which lenders charge lower rates because they recognize that connections enhance the borrower's credit worthiness and a Bank Channel in which banks assign greater value to connected loans to enhance their own relationships with key politicians. After employing a series of tests to distinguish between these two channels, we find strong support for the Borrower Channel but no direct evidence supporting the Bank Channel. Finally, we demonstrate that political connections reduce the likelihood of a capital expenditure restriction or liquidity requirement commanded by banks at the origination of the loan. Taken together, our results suggest that political connections increase the value of U.S. companies and reduce monitoring costs and credit risk faced by banks, which, in turn, reduces the borrower's cost of debt.
We show that gender diversity in corporate boards could improve firm value because of the contributions that women make to the board. Prior studies examine valuation effects of gender-diverse boards ...and reach mixed conclusions. To help resolve this conundrum, we consider how gender diversity could affect firm value, that is, what mechanisms could explain how female directors benefit corporate board performance. We hypothesize and provide evidence that women directors contribute to boards by offering specific functional expertise, often missing from corporate boards. The additional expertise increases board heterogeneity which Kim and Starks (2015) show can increase firm value.
We examine the role of cultural heritage in shaping U.S. CEOs’ attitudes toward uncertainty, in the context of their corporate acquisition decisions. We find that CEOs with a more ...uncertainty-avoiding cultural heritage are less likely to engage in acquisitions. Conditional on making an acquisition, uncertainty-averse CEOs prefer targets in familiar industries and targets that can be more easily integrated. The emphasis on cultural identity by CEOs’ parents and the ethnic composition of CEOs’ early life environment significantly influence the cultural transmission process. Cultural differences about uncertainty attitudes persist over multiple generations, but become less pronounced over time.
