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Several researchers have found that the value of stock declines at the announcement of a debt for equity swap. This decline is attributed to an information effect: the firm’s financial condition is worse than the market expected. Our research develops an alternative explanation. Using the theory that equity can be valued as an option on the firm, it is shown that, depending on the exchange ratio, a debt for equity swap will cause the price of the stock to decline. This theory is tested using a sample of firms that announced debt for common equity swaps. The theoretically predicted stock price reactions are consistent with the actually observed stock price reactions. Furthermore, the contingent claims model has better explanatory power than a simple model of dilution. Tests on the sensitivity to the assumptions of the option pricing model show that only the assumption of the time to expiration of the option significantly affects the results.

Considers the implications of EMU and the introduction of the euro for European financial institutions and markets. Discusses the likely effects on interest rates, banks, stock/futures exchanges, asset allocation and the markets for bonds, equities and derivatives. Warns that financial markets and institutions must adjust to these changes in order to survive, but believes that European economies will benefit in the long run.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in men in the UK. Black men are in a higher prostate cancer risk group possibly due to inherent genetic factors. The purpose of this paper is to introduce PROstate Cancer Evaluation and Education (PROCEE), an innovative serious game aimed at providing prostate cancer information and risk evaluation to black African-Caribbean men.

PROCEE has been carefully co-designed with prostate cancer experts, prostate cancer patients and members of the black African-Caribbean community in order to ensure that it meets the real needs and expectations of the target audience.

During the co-design process, the users defined an easy to use and entertaining game which can effectively raise awareness, inform users about prostate cancer and their risk, and encourage symptomatic men to seek medical attention in a timely manner.

During focus group evaluations, users embraced the game and emphasised that it can potentially have a positive impact on changing user behaviour among high risk men who are experiencing symptoms and who are reluctant to visit their doctor.

The purpose of this paper is to support the use of unique identifiers for the authors of scientific publications. This, the authors believe, aligns with the views of many others, as it would solve the problem of author disambiguation. If every researcher had a unique identifier, there would be significant opportunities to provide even more services. These extensions are proposed in this paper.

The authors discuss the bibliographic services that are currently available. This leads to a discussion of how these services could be developed and extended.

The authors suggest a number of ways that a unique identifier for scientific authors could support many other areas of importance to the scientific community. This will provide a much more robust system that provides a much richer and more easily maintained, scientific environment.

The scientific community lags behind most other communities with regard to the way it identifies individuals. Even if the current vision for a unique identifier for authors was to become more widespread, there would still be many areas where the community could improve its operations. This viewpoint paper suggests some of these, along with a financial model that could underpin the functionality.

The impact of bullying and undermining behaviours on the National Health Service on costs, patient safety and retention of staff was well understood even before the Illing report, published in 2013, that reviewed the efficacy of training interventions designed to reduce bullying and harassment in the outputs. The purpose of this paper is to provide an example of a good programme well evaluated.

The methodology follows a broad realist approach, by specifying the underlying programme assumptions and intention of the designers. Three months after the event, Q-sort methodology was employed to group participants into one of three contexts – mechanism – output groups. Interviews were then undertaken with members of two of these groups, to evaluate how the programme had influenced each.

Q-sort identified a typology of three beneficiaries from the Stopit! workshops, characterised as professionals, colleagues and victims. Each group had acted upon different parts of the programme, depending chiefly upon their current and past experiences of bullying in hospitals.

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of using Q-sort method to identify relevant CMOs in a realist evaluation framework.

The paper considers the effectiveness of the programme to reduce bullying, rather than teach victims to cope, and how it may be strengthened based upon the research findings and Illing recommendations.

Workplace bullying is invariably implicated in scandals concerning poor hospital practice, poor patient outcomes and staff illness. All too frequently, the sector responds by offering training in resilience, which though helpful, places the onus on the victim to cope rather than the employer to reduce or eliminate the practice. This paper documents and evaluates an attempt to change workplace practices to directly address bullying and undermining.

The paper describes a new programme broadly consistent with Illing report endorsements. Second, it illustrates a novel evaluation method that highlights rigorously the contexts, mechanisms and outcomes at the pilot stage of an intervention identifies contexts and mechanisms via factor analysis using Q-sort methodology.

Happiness in teaching, termed Eudemonia, comes from a perception of a relationship with students. Such a perception is vital to sustaining teachers in their work in both on- and offline contexts. While the importance of these relationships has been acknowledged, there have not been attempts to account for how teachers pursue relationships and the accompanying sense of happiness. It is in this frame that we discuss findings from a larger study of online teachers working to support students with disabilities in a part-time program at a large virtual school.

The chapter considers expectations for online teachers and sets up a dialogue between same and different as they relate to on- and offline pedagogy. It then asks more questions about these responsibilities in the context of efforts by teachers to feel legitimate in their claims to relationships with students.

Stories that both elicited and threatened Eudemonia are shared and discussed. In particular, the authors learned that online teachers desired relationships with students to such a great extent that they were willing to narrate relationality into most interactions with the students.

These findings suggest the difficult emotional work that online teachers must do in order to consider their work with students as beneficial. More work is needed to think about how relationships between teachers and students online can be leveraged for greater learning and to sustain both teachers and students in their work.

This chapter offers in-depth insight into the teacher work that online learning requires. It also offers a unique theoretical approach in the juxtaposition of stories of relationships with students online and offline.

The purpose of this study is threefold: to examine the impact of a remuneration committee (RC) on the level of chief executive officer (CEO) remuneration; whether firms with a RC, pay a premium to CEOs with different skill sets (general or specific); and whether a pay premium mitigates the potential for CEO turnover.

This study uses a sample of 5,305 firm-year observations on a data set drawn from companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange for the period 2007 to 2014. The authors use ordinary least squares as well as logit regression techniques to test the formulated hypotheses. Difference in difference and propensity score matching techniques were undertaken to address the endogeneity concerns.

The findings show that firms with a RC pay a higher total remuneration to CEOs compared to firms without a RC. Furthermore, firms with a RC, value and reward CEOs with general skills by paying a premium not offered to CEOs with industry-specific skills. Paying a premium, in turn, mitigates CEO turnover by strengthening the CEO’s commitment to the organisation.

The study helps us to understand the critical role played by the RC in the remuneration of CEOs. The findings show that RCs act as an effective governance mechanism to deal with issues of executive remuneration and to retain skilled CEOs. Additionally, CEOs who acquire and develop general managerial skills will be able to extract higher pay from improved bargaining power. The findings will be of relevance to shareholders, regulators and company management who have an interest in executive pay and performance.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the vulnerability of the important rangeland shrub, Atriplex leucoclada (Boiss) to both climate change and livestock grazing, within the Syrian rangelands as a representative landscape type of West Asia.

Ecologically based quantitative niche models were developed for both shrub species using maximum entropy and 13 spatially explicit GIS-based layers to predict current and future species distribution scenarios. Climatic variables varied over time in line with the predictions created from the HADCM3 global circulation model.

Results indicate that with grazing and climate change, the distribution of A. leucoclada will be reduced by 54 per cent in 2050, with the mean annual and minimum temperatures of the coldest month having the highest contribution in the model (28.7 and 21.2 per cent, respectively). The contribution of the grazing pressure, expressed by the overgrazing index, was estimated at 8.2 per cent.

These results suggest that the interaction of climate and increased grazing has the potential to favor the establishment of unpalatable species, while reducing the distribution of preferred plant species on western Asia rangelands.

In 2013, the television programme Hannibal debuted on television. Taking characters and narrative from three novels by Thomas Harris (Red Dragon (1981), Silence of the Lambs (1989) and Hannibal (1999)) over three seasons, the audience got to spend time with Dr Hannibal Lecter. Appearing 32 years after the first book and 27 years after Hannibal’s first screen appearance, much has changed in Dr Lecter’s world and the most interesting of these changes is the gender of characters.

In Red Dragon, Dr Alan Bloom and Freddy Lounds are men, and in the television series, they are women. This chapter argues that another change in genders occurs as Will Graham replaces Clarice Starling as the person Lecter seduces. It also introduces a female psychiatrist for Dr Lecter. These changes alter the presentation of the specific characters but also that of the overall narrative arc of the television series.

This chapter will identify and evaluate these shifts in gender and consider how these changes impact the viewer experience. The change of the familiar to the unfamiliar is uncanny, and it is this argument that adds to the presentation of Will and Hannibal as figures of horror and increases audience anxiety and fear.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.