Search results

Intangible assets have grown in size and importance to individual firms and to the economy as a whole. Many have examined and written about ways to value the intangible assets of firms and the overall economy. Professor Baruch Lev of New York University has developed an approach to measure intangibles performance for any company, or division of a company, that uses GAAP financial reporting and that has publicly traded equity. Professor Lev has also established how intangibles performance is linked to stock returns. The collaborative research of the co‐authors has extended this linkage by identifying certain management practices as drivers of intangibles performance. The culmination of this work is a breakthrough – for the first time, specific management practices can be linked to stock returns.

Several popular and academic pieces of late have expressed concerns regarding the sustainability of public defined benefit pension funds. Since the onset of the Great Recession, concern has increased. In this paper recent arguments are analyzed in the context of three related data sets: panel data on public sector pensions spanning 2001-2009, historic asset return data, and business cycle data. Findings generally indicate that while public sector plans have suffered a difficult decade, current anxieties may be somewhat overwrought. Several remedial policies are investigated. Remedial policies, such as improving plan administration, altering portfolio allocations, and increasing both employee and employer contributions, are observed to be more promising than either freezing or closing the funds.

The twenty-first century has seen a wave of white-collar and corporate crime scandals and the economic crisis associated with the home mortgage foreclosure debacle is but one prominent example. Understanding who is to blame for this crisis and what steps can be taken in the future to limit a reoccurrence are important topics of inquiry. Similarly important is understanding public perceptions associated with the mortgage foreclosure crisis, especially since public sentiments are potentially important in influencing crime control policy. Using data from a random sample survey of American adults, this chapter examines the degree to which the public blames banks/lenders as opposed to individual homebuyers for the American foreclosure problems as well as the extent to which they favor specific control and prevention strategies such as government limitations on executive pay or bonuses and legislation aimed at increasing the regulation of business.

Despite increased focus on the importance of the time principals spend on instructional leadership, there is little research on practical ways to help principals manage their time to achieve this goal. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implementation of the school administration manager (SAM) process: a unique program designed to help principals orient their time toward instructional activities.

This mixed-methods study combines data from multiple sources including: case studies of four districts that involved interviews with principals and program staff in 16 schools; interviews with network-level staff and administrators; a survey of 387 principals and 378 program staff; and time use data collected by shadowers as well as a time-tracking calendar system for 373 principals.

Principals and their teams implemented the SAM process with relatively high fidelity. In addition, most participated in the program to increase time spent on instructional tasks. Indeed, principals’ time use shifted from managerial to instructional tasks as they implemented the program. However, there were important challenges related to the time and personnel resources required to implement the program as well as questions about the quality of the instructional leadership time spent.

This study describes not only time allocation, but also a process through which principals intentionally sought to shift their time toward instructional leadership activities. The insights gained from the implementation and outcomes of this process provide concrete direction for policymakers, practitioners and researchers looking for ways to change the time principals spend on instructional leadership.

Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

Time demands faced by school principals make principals’ work increasingly difficult. Research outside education suggests that effective time management skills may help principals meet job demands, reduce job stress, and improve their performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate these hypotheses.

The authors administered a time management inventory to nearly 300 principals in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth-largest school district in the USA. The authors analyzed scores on the inventory descriptively and used them to predict time-use data collected via in-person observations, a survey-based measure of job stress, and measures of perceived job effectiveness obtained from assistant principals and teachers in the school.

Principals with better time management skills allocate more time in classrooms and to managing instruction in their schools but spend less time on interpersonal relationship-building. Perhaps as a result of this tradeoff, the authors find that associations between principal time management skills and subjective assessments of principal performance are mixed. The authors find strong evidence, however, that time management skills are associated with lower principal job stress.

Findings suggest that building principals’ time management capacities may be a worthwhile strategy for increasing time on high-priority tasks and reducing stress.

This study is the first to empirically examine time management among school principals and link time management to key principal outcomes using large-scale data.

The aim of this study is to test a technological solution to two traditional limitations of information sharing between law enforcement agencies: data quality and privacy concerns.

Entity Analytics Software (EAS) was tested in two studies with North American law enforcement agencies. In the first test, duplicated cases held in a police record system were successfully identified (4.0 percent) to a greater extent than the traditionally used software program (1.5 percent). This resulted in a difference of 11,954 cases that otherwise would not have been identified as duplications. In the second test, entity information held separately by police and border officials was shared anonymously between these two organizations. This resulted in 1,827 alerts regarding entities that appeared in both systems; traditionally, this information could not have been shared, given privacy concerns, and neither agency would be aware of the relevant information held by the other. Data duplication resulted in an additional 1,041 alerts, which highlights the need to use technological solutions to improve data quality prior to and during information sharing.

The current study demonstrated that EAS has the potential to merge data from different technologically based systems, while identifying errors and reducing privacy concerns through anonymization of identifiers.

While only one potential technological solution (EAS) was tested and organizations must consider the potential expense associated with implementing such technology, the implications resulting from both studies for improved awareness and greater efficiency support and facilitate information sharing between law enforcement organizations.

As they operate in complex schools principals must allocate their attention to numerous responsibilities. This paper seeks to ask three questions: how do principals allocate their attention across major realms of responsibility; to what extent do principals in different contexts emphasize different realms of responsibility; and to what extent do individual attributes affect how principals allocate their attention across realms?

A cluster analysis is applied to data from a daily log of principal practices to identify principals who allocate their attention across major realms of responsibility in similar ways. With the three groups identified in the cluster analysis a discriminant analysis is then used to examine the individual attributes of the principals and the contexts within which these groups work to identify those individual characteristics and contextual conditions that best predict each principal's cluster membership.

The data from the log indicate that principals are not as fragmented across numerous realms of responsibility as previous research suggests. Some principals do spend considerable time on instructional leadership. The cluster analysis revealed three groups: “Eclectic” Leaders (their activities are distributed more evenly across different activities); Instructional Leaders (they focused most on Instructional Leadership); and Student Leaders (they emphasized student affairs). In the paper's discriminant analyses no individual attributes distinguished amongst the three types of principals; only contextual conditions predicted membership.

The results point to the influence that context plays on school principals' practice; principals appear to prioritize and focus their actions under more challenging contextual conditions. The next step in the analysis is to determine how the leadership clusters and principal practices relate to important school outcomes.

The paper provides useful information on influences on school principals' practice.