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This paper extends the risk-return argument of modern portfolio theory to the institutional typologies with which state-sponsored local government investment pools (LGIPs) operate. By using fixed-effects regression on monthly panel data from 18 LGIPs across seven years, the author found that institutional typologies with which LGIPs operate matter. An LGIP should be structured and managed based on its ability to mitigate risks. The paper contributes to increasing the accountability and fiscal governance over public money and promotes public funds investment laws in the US, UK and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes PA research on organizational performance in a new direction by testing a configurational model using self-organizing maps, a machine learning methodology. The model was built and tested using six performance dimensions from 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). Four distinct performance profiles or groups were identified: very low performers, average performers, transitional performers, and high performers. Implications for theory development and practice of configurational models of public organizational performance were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper is the first to identify the determinants which explain the presence of women on the board of directors and to study the relationship between gender diversity and financial performance in a US REIT context. We apply a two-stage Heckman approach to a unique panel dataset of 112 US Equity REITs over the period 2005-2015. Our results show that a REIT's likelihood of having a woman on the board of directors depends strongly on board attributes. Especially institutional investors support gender-diverse leadership teams, which might be driven by the perception that women contribute to an enhanced internal monitoring in the REIT context, in which external monitoring is weakened through ownership restrictions. We find evidence of a U-shaped relationship between gender diversity in executive positions and price per net asset value (PRICE/NAV). In the case of REITs, a critical mass of female executives is reached at approximately 30% representation. This finding holds especially for real estate sectors with a strong consumer orientation and a high proportion of women in the workforce, such as retail and healthcare. Our performance analysis demonstrates that gender diversity has a positive effect on market performance (PRICE/NAV), but not on operating performance (FFO/SHARE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes an empirical model linking a retail firm’s inventory management effectiveness to superior competitive operational performance for specific product-line retail segments. Using 16 years of US retail firm financial data from the COMPUSTAT Fundamentals database across 12 distinct competitive retailing segments, we develop and test a time-series model that links several inventory management execution measures to the competitive operational outperformance of retail firms. The analysis presented provides strong evidence that measures of inventory management performance are not ‘one size fits all’ for the retail industry, and helps to explain why extant research has had difficulty linking inventory control policy effectiveness to operational performance advantages in retailing. We discuss the implications of these empirical findings on the study of inventory policy execution, and offer some guidance for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is one of the performance measurements in the research on sport entrepreneurship. Another measure of performance studied is coopetition (simultaneous collaboration and competition). This study tested how EO might affect coopetition. In total, 106 sport entrepreneurs from the United States participated in a survey. This survey included an experiment measuring participants' coopetition tendency (the dependent variable) and EO (the independent variable). EO affected coopetition. This relationship was negative among sport entrepreneurs who reported training with their potential competitors and positive among sport entrepreneurs who did not report such training. EO-behaviors (developing sport products, services, techniques, equipment, and practices) can encourage sport entrepreneurs towards coopetition. This might especially be the case for sport entrepreneurs who use their skills acquired from sports that they train or trained alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on agency theory by examining relations between family involvement and CEO compensation. Using a panel of 362 small U.S. listed firms, we analyze how founding families influence firm performance through option portfolio price sensitivity. Consistent with the dual agency framework, we find that family firms have lower CEO incentive pay, which is further reduced by higher executive ownership. Interestingly, such incentive pay offsets the positive impact that families have on firm valuation. Collectively, our results show that, compared with nonfamily firms, lower incentive pay adopted by family firms due to lower agency costs mitigates the direct effect of family involvement on firm performance. Once accounting for CEO incentive pay, we do not observe performance differences between family and nonfamily firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implications of electronic monitoring systems for organizational information flows and worker control, in the context of the U.S. trucking industry. Truckers, a spatially dispersed group of workers with a traditionally independent culture and a high degree of autonomy, are increasingly subjected to performance monitoring via fleet management systems that record and transmit fine-grained data about their location and behaviors. These systems redistribute operational information within firms by accruing real-time aggregated data in a remote company dispatcher. This redistribution results in a seemingly incongruous set of effects. First, abstracted and aggregated data streams allow dispatchers to quantitatively evaluate truckers’ job performance across new metrics, and to challenge truckers’ accounts of local and biophysical conditions. Second, even as these data are abstracted, information about truckers’ activities is simultaneously resocialized via its strategic deployment into truckers’ social relationships with their coworkers and families. These disparate dynamics operate together to facilitate firms’ control over truckers’ daily work practices in a manner that was not previously possible. The trucking case reveals multifaceted pathways to the entrenchment of organizational control via electronic monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We survey recent (mainly US) research on the effects of earnings presentation attributes on manager and user behavior. The literature we discuss relates to three primary earnings presentation attributes: (1) disaggregation (vertical and horizontal), (2) location (recognition vs. disclosure, which statement for recognized items, and within statement classification, labeling, and subtotals), and (3) narrative attributes (location of key amounts within narratives, readability, medium, and timing of disclosure). We show that disaggregation operates mainly by directly affecting information content. Location operates mainly by indirectly affecting information content through changes in managers' actionsandby affecting ease of processing. Narrative presentation attributes operate mainly by affecting ease of processing. These differences in mechanisms determine the implications of the presentation attributes for contracting and valuation uses of accounting information. They also have implications for future research and standard setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the blinded Baldrige scoring data released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2009 to examine some fundamental questions and provide insights relating to the Baldrige program and scoring process. Specifically, the author investigates how applicant performance has evolved during this time period as reflected in examiner scoring, and develops some insights regarding examiner performance using a descriptive analysis of the data, supplemented by some basic statistical inference tests. He observes significant differences between large organizations and the small business sector, which has consistently lagged the other sectors, a decline in scoring-related performance relative to the Baldrige criteria within the for-profit sectors, steady increases within health care and education, and improvement in examiner performance as measured by scoring variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Service Industries Journal is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A review of the article "The drivers, consequences and policy implications of non-GAAP earnings reporting" by Steven Young, which appeared in the periodical "Accounting & Business Research" in 2014, is presented.

A review of the article "The role of revenue recognition in performance reporting" by Alfred Wagenhofer, which appeared in the periodical "Accounting & Business Research" in 2014, is presented.

We investigate the specification and power of intraday event study test statistics. Mean, market, and matched firm models generate well-specified return results for a range of intervals up to 60 min around the event. These models detect return shocks equivalent to one spread in one-minute interval data and three spreads in longer intervals. Researchers using intraday return event studies can, therefore, be confident in their robustness. Some volume event study approaches have reasonable power but they are not generally well specified, while a matched-firm approach gives the best combination of specification and power for spread event studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) philosophy is a key weapon in achieving global manufacturing competitiveness. It encompasses a wide range of dimensions to improve all aspects of operational performance metrics. The aim of the study is to examine the current state of flexibility adoption in U.S. automotive manufacturing facilities and its impact on operational performance metrics. It utilizes survey questionnaire developed based on previous work in U.S. manufacturing industry. The survey was originally distributed to 420 facility managers in the U.S. domestic automotive industry. It was revealed that 70% of the respondents had implemented all 15 flexibility dimensions listed in the questionnaire. The data analysis conducted shows that implementation of certain flexibility dimensions will lead to significant improvement in specific operational performance metrics. This considerable finding can be used as a guide for manufacturing managers to achieve certain objectives in operational performance improvement in a rapidly changing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from a survey of U.S. arts and design graduates (N = 26,672) to analyse the prevalence, predictors, and outcomes of multi-disciplinary artistic careers. We propose that the practice of multiple artforms is a common, albeit under-acknowledged, component of nimbly navigating artistic labour markets, alongside other strategies such as multiple jobholding and self-employment. While there are undoubtedly benefits to specialization, overall, we find that generalist arts alumni are more likely to continue working in the arts well after graduation. Being a multi-disciplinary artist is significantly associated with a range of entrepreneurial career activities, such as self-employment or freelancing, teaching in the arts, or managing an arts-related organization. Working across multiple artforms is connected to feeling satisfied with one’s education and career pathways, however multi-disciplinary artists are significantly less satisfied with the levels of job security and income that their current work provides. We conclude with implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of corporate venture capital (CVC) investment on startup innovation performance has been examined in the extant literature. However, when this effect is enhanced is the important but relatively understudied question in strategy and entrepreneurship research. We build on the idea of regarding CVC investment relationships as learning alliances and introduce two situational factors as boundary conditions on the performance effect of CVC investment. In order to handle the endogeneity of CVC investment, we employ propensity score matching and differences-in-differences techniques. Based on the sample of startups in the human biotechnology industry in the United States, we find that CVC funding is beneficial for startup innovativeness when CVC investment is established after initial independent venture capital funding. Moreover, a startup’s patent stock before CVC funding also influences on that effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We investigate the effect of pre-entry experience on firms’ performance in terms of survival. In particular we focus on entrants from a related upstream industry – semiconductors – into a downstream industry – telecommunications. We examine a sample of 336 de-novo start-ups in the US telecommunication industry and we estimate a discrete time hazard model of firm exit. Our findings show that, after controlling for both firms and founders’ characteristics, firms whose founders had prior experience in a related upstream industry such as semiconductors enjoy a relatively lower hazard of exit with respect to intra-industry spinoffs and other types of start-ups. Additionally, background heterogeneity of the founding team is an important determinant of survival for the firms in our sample. Our results point to the role of interdependences and technological complementarities between two vertically related industries in affecting the performance of new entrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From approximately 1900 through the early 1970s, the examination of organizational performance in the United States reflected the Input/Output construct, which is associated with, if not derived from, scientific management. Beginning in the mid-1950s and accelerating in the 1970s, this construct transformed through systems thinking to Input → Throughput → Output. In current language, this sort of model is known as the “logic model.” There is no single accepted variant of the logic model. This process could be improved by adopting more coherence, integration with more performance constructs, and use of more systems constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine angel investors and venture capital investors to determine how they interact in the market for small firm equity investment. We first generate a novel dataset of firms going through their initial public offerings and using the disclosures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission, classify firms having angel investors, venture capital investors, or both angel and venture capital investors. We find that the location, industry, and timing of firms backed by these different investor groups are strikingly different. We then compare the post-IPO operating performance of the firms in our sample for backed versus unbacked firms and find a significant difference for venture-backed firms, but not for angel-backed firms. For a subset of firms with angel and venture capital backing, we find some complementarities in the investment of angel and venture capital investors. However, on the whole, our results suggest that angel investors and venture capital investors serve different sets of firms who need to obtain outside equity financing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The impact of strategic human resource management (SHRM) on organizational performance is assessed. Additionally, the impact of a SHRM approach on the individual performance, organizational commitment and job satisfaction levels of human resource professionals is investigated. An organization exhibits SHRM when the human resources function is vertically aligned with the mission and objectives of the organization and horizontally integrated with other organizational functions. Data from a national sample of 269 human resource professionals from large US manufacturing firms were analyzed using structural equation modeling techniques. Results indicate that the direct impact of SHRM on organizational performance is positive and significant, as hypothesized. Further, SHRM was found to directly and positively influence individual performance, organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Top managers implementing a SHRM system can, therefore, expect improved organizational performance and improved levels of individual performance, job satisfaction and organizational commitment from the organization's human resource professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]