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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of institutional investors on the cost of bank loans using US bank loan data from 1995 to 2012.

The cost of bank loans is analyzed with regard to loan spreads, collateral requirements, and the number of prepayment covenants.

This paper finds that, first, holding institutional ownership constant, institutional control is positively related to the cost of bank loans, implying that strong institutional control intensifies conflicts between large shareholders and lenders. Second, institutional holdings are negatively related to the cost of bank loans. These results indicate that institutional monitoring reduces the agency problem between shareholders and managers.

This paper suggests that the trade-off between institutional monitoring and institutional control jointly determines the effect of institutional investors on the cost of bank loans. Moreover, lenders should consider large shareholders and their influence when making lending decisions.

In the growing debate about designing new management control systems (MCS) to include stakeholder values, there has been little discussion about information overload. Stakeholder advocates call for including more environmental and related social disclosures but do not consider how information overload might impair the use and interpretation of corporate performance measures. As we know, shareholders and boards of directors are most concerned with market data such as earnings per share, dividend rates, and market value growth. In this chapter, we assert that management control system designers must consider information overload before expanding the MCS to include social and nonfinancial disclosures.

The paradox in expanding MCS is that demand for sustainability performance measures will likely result in overload for both information preparers and information users. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and similar sustainability disclosures are likely to overload MCS and overwhelm the readers and users by performance reports that include multiple dimensions.

CSR affects the design of companies' annual reports because stakeholders are increasingly concerned with how organizations address their social responsibilities and how they disclose their societal responses. Management accountants are accustomed to providing performance measures within an organization and MCS usually have an internal focus. CFOs are often not accustomed to balancing the needs of stakeholders with those of managers and owners. We suggest that companies and CFOs will face an information overload dilemma in making these determinations, and that users will be overloaded in sifting through the multiple dimensions of information that are increasingly being provided. We suggest that the bias toward financial performance measures will distort both the provision of relevant information and the use of sustainability performance measures. We modified the Epstein and Roy sustainability model (2001) to illustrate some of these potential impacts.

We note that the balanced scorecard (BSC) was developed as one such tool to reflect and communicate multiple measures. We summarize a previous study showing how managers ignored multiple performance measures in a performance scorecard study. We then relate our results to some of the information overload literature to support our suggestion that stakeholders will face many of the same information overload issues and constraints when using and processing social disclosures.

Our summary of the information overload literature results in a call for more interdisciplinary information overload research involving real-world contexts and tasks. We note that most of the extant information overload literature is restricted to discipline-based silo-oriented studies and to simplistic evaluations, brand identification, or forecasting tasks. Our study went into some depth to describe the business, its strategies and objectives, and a comparison of actual results to specific goals. As management control systems evolve or are designed to report sustainability data, the issues surrounding increasing complexity and information overload will become exponentially problematic. We suggest that future research also include consideration of information overload conditions facing preparers and disclosers of sustainability measures.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of bank interventions on bond performance in relation to loan covenant violations.

This paper tests the following questions: do bondholders receive benefits from bank interventions? Is bond performance related to the probability of bank interventions? Is the turnover of a chief executive officer (CEO) associated with bank interventions and bond performance? Abnormal bond returns, the difference between bond returns and matched bond index returns are used to measure bond performance. An estimated outstanding loan balance is used to measure the probability of bank interventions. CEO turnover is identified from proxy statements and categorized into forced and voluntary CEO turnovers. Event studies and regression analysis were used to answer the above research questions.

This paper finds that both short-term and long-term bond returns increase after covenant violations, bond performance is positively related to the probability of bank interventions, forced CEO turnovers are positively associated with the probability of bank interventions and firms with forced CEO turnovers tend to have superior bond performance.

This paper is the first to explore the relation between bank interventions and bond performance.

Machiavelli's dictums in The Prince (1977) instigated the modern discourse on power. Arguing that “there's such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation” (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 44), his approach is a realist one. In this text, Machiavelli (1977, p. 3) endeavors to “discuss the rule of princes” and to “lay down principles for them.” Taking his lead, Foucault (1978, p. 97) argued that “if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few…who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.” He believed that we should “investigate…how mechanisms of power have been able to function…how these mechanisms…have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful…in a given context for specific reasons,” and, therefore, “we should…base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 100–102). Conceptualizing such techniques and tactics as the “art of governance”, Foucault (1991), examined power as strategies geared toward managing civic populations through shaping people's dispositions and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate employees' reactions to a comprehensive change: to change aspects of the organization's working atmosphere at a mid‐sized municipal government located in Ontario, Canada. It aims to use the perception of success of the ongoing change effort as the main dependent variable.

The study was cross‐sectional in nature. Data were collected via a survey, and correlational analysis and PLS were used to analyze the data.

The results showed that the relationship between perceptions of success of the ongoing change effort and perceived sense of competence; affective commitment; satisfaction with organizational members; opportunities to participate in decision making; opportunities for development and growth; and respect in the workplace was significant.

Future studies should include a more objective measure of success of the change efforts, such as absenteeism, turnover, levels of service provided, helping behavior and other organizational citizenship behaviors, and grievances filed.

Individual and workplace variables explain significant variance in the perception of success to improve the working atmosphere at a municipal organization. These variables should be given consideration during the implementation of change. Anecdotal evidence often indicates that leaders faced with comprehensive change do things that conflict with increasing readiness for change and to create enthusiasm for the change.

Government agencies face unprecedented change. It is imperative for these organizations to manage change in an effective and efficient manner in their pursuit of creating public value. Research on change in public sector organizations is sparse.

This article reviews the telecommunications environment and infrastructure, discusses the major forces influencing change within this environment, and suggests certain likely outcomes, as seen by the author, that will have significant influences on the future telecommunications infrastructure. This information is then used as the basis for assessing likely impacts on various aspects of library and information systems, their providers and users. Specifically discussed are impacts foreseen for: 1) national online information providers; 2) local online information providers; 3) local and long‐distance telephone companies as providers of information; and 4) users of information. Impacts on library and information system‐related endeavors are seen to be generally unfavorable in the near term, with information delivery costs seen to rise significantly in the next three to five years. A more favorable prognosis, however, is seen for the longer term.

In light of advances in the theory of cognition (Anderson, 1996, 2000; Anderson & Fincham, 1994; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) and research on learning from worked examples (Atkinson et al., 2000; Cooper & Sweller, 1987; Sweller & Cooper, 1985), this study extends earlier research findings that auditors need practice and certain kinds of feedback to acquire procedural knowledge to identify causes of variations between expected and actual financial ratios. We test an alternative form of instruction: worked examples. As predicted by Anderson's ACT-R 4.0 theory, the results indicate individuals’ pre-test declarative knowledge interacts significantly with learning method (with or without examples) on procedural knowledge acquisition. In contrast to prior findings, this study shows that improvements in auditing procedural knowledge can be achieved by passive instruction in worked examples, a potentially more efficient (cost-effective) method than practice and feedback for auditor training.

In this chapter, we have proposed that an important approach to understanding occupational stress and well-being among racial and ethnic minority workers is to integrate the occupational health disparities paradigm into work stress research. As such, the current chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the existing literature on occupational health disparities for Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans. Each of the three sections has highlighted the unique occupational health problems encountered by the specific racial and ethnic group as well as the research and policy gaps. We end with a series of recommendations for future research.

DONCASTER'S new Central Library was formally opened on 29th December 1969 on precisely the 100th anniversary of the opening of the first public library in Doncaster. Conforming to tradition, the Library was opened by the Mayor of Doncaster, Councillor Marcus Outwin. The President of the Library Association, Mr. Wilfred Ashworth, addressed the assembled guests, his last official appointment before relinquishing the office.