Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTManuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: Does recent institutional shareholder activism have a precedent in the form of (ad hoc) shareholder coalitions that force the manager to leave poorly performing companies?Research Findings/Insights: To address the above question, we investigate whether or not shareholder voting coalitions disciplined managers in the pre‐Cadbury era. We find that the voting power held (Shapley values) by financial institutions (mainly, the insurance companies) are positively related to executive director turnover. Coalitions of industrial and commercial companies with strong relative voting power penalize poorly performing managers. In contrast, coalitions of executive directors are able to resist board restructuring. Finally, we a strong relation between top management substitution and high debt levels, especially in companies in need of refinancing.Theoretical/Academic Implications: We use Shapley values which are power indices developed in the field of (oceanic) game theory in order to capture the relative voting power of a shareholder in all possible shareholder coalitions. A shareholder who is pivotal in many potential coalitions is hence powerful and received a high Shapley value. The use of such power indices yield much stronger results in our models that any of the other measures traditionally used in corporate governance research to measure voting power/ownership concentration. This methodology enables us to draw clear conclusions on the existence of voting coalitions.Practitioner/Policy Implications: This paper shows that voting coalition of shareholders can be instrumental in bringing about change in poorly performing companies.

The name of Sir Adrian Cadbury has become synonymous with the development of corporate governance. His original involvement was chairing the UK Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance in 1991, whose report has taken the name of Cadbury into the annals of the subject. Since then Sir Adrian has visited 28 countries, contributing massively to the raising of board level standards around the world. Now he reports that he has enjoyed this governance odyssey, but is "retiring from this particular field". His contributions as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of this journal have been very significant. Here he draws some conclusions on the state of corporate governance and likely developments in the future.

In 1933, as Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger hatched a daring and courageous plan: to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler's hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils. She knew that to protect them she had to get her pupils to the safety of England. But the safe haven that Anna struggled to create in a rundown manor house in Kent would test her to the limit. As the news from Europe continued to darken, Anna rescued successive waves of fleeing children and, when war broke out, she and her pupils faced a second exodus. One by one countries fell to the Nazis and before long unspeakable rumors began to circulate. Red Cross messages stopped and parents in occupied Europe vanished. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope; the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna's school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives, showing them that, despite everything, there was still a world worth fighting for.Featuring moving first-hand testimony, and drawn from letters, diaries and present-day interviews, The School That Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique child's-eye perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman's refusal to allow her beliefs in a better, more equitable world to be overtaken by the evil that surrounded her

Combining commercial success with philanthropy and social activism, ?Quakernomics' offers a compelling model for corporate social responsibility in the modern world. Mike King explores the ethical capitalism of Quaker enterprises from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, testing this theory against those of prominent economists. With a foreword by Sir Adrian Cadbury, this book proves that the Quaker practice of ?total capitalism' is not a historically remote nicety but an immediately relevant guide for today's global economy.