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The purpose of this paper is to complement existing research of the relationship between concentrated ownership and firm performance by theoretically exploring the impact of outside blockholders on the firm, primarily from the perspective of voting power.

This paper proposes theoretical propositions based on analyses and logical extension of results of the existing theoretical and empirical studies.

This paper proposes three theoretical predictions: First, voting power provides outside blockholders a necessary condition to pursue shared and private benefits of control, and it is positively correlated with blockholders’ capability of influencing firm value. Second, everything else being equal, an outside blockholder is more (less) likely to pursue private benefits than shared benefits when the equity market is efficient and when the blockholder’s voting power is less (more) than 50 per cent. Third, controlling outside blockholders can capitalize on their voting power to appoint managerial delegates and board representatives to the invested firms for the purpose of pursuing private benefits of control.

This paper tries to make two contributions to the corporate governance literature. First, this research relies on a new perspective to explore the relationship between ownership structure and firm value. Second, this paper presents the first theoretical argument which states that controlling outside blockholders rely on their managerial delegates and board representatives to pursue their private benefits of control.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the ownership structure of firms and the private benefits of control through an analysis of Chinese listed firms.

Using a sample of Chinese firms, cases were examined where there had been a transaction involving non‐tradable stock. The cases where there had been stock transactions which both did and did not involve the transfer of control within a single year were selected. The difference between these two types of transaction was used to estimate the private benefits of control in Chinese listed firms. Regression analysis was used to explore the relationship between ownership structure and private benefits of control in Chinese listed firms.

The results show that the average private benefit of control is 18.52 percent in China. The regression results show a significant, positive relationship between the controlling shareholders, the combined shareholdings of the second to fifth largest shareholder and private benefits of control. However, there is a negative but insignificant relationship between the tradable share value and private benefits of control. With regard to the relationship between managerial shareholding and private benefits of control, the regression results show a positive but insignificant relationship.

Further insights into the private benefits of control can be obtained by inspecting the change around major corporate events involving significant ownership changes. In this study, the focus was on non‐tradable stock. Investigating all stock would be a fruitful area for future research.

In China, firms should optimize the ownership structure and curb expropriation by controlling shareholders. This would help to promote a sound development of Chinese listed firms and the capital market.

The research provides useful information on the impact of ownership structure on private benefits of control in a sample of listed firms in China.

Targeting public–private partnership (PPP) rental retirement villages, the purpose of this paper is to bring forward the solution of insufficient research in a non-competitive guarantee (a restrictive agreement) towards the compensation and guarantee costs in consideration of benefit redistribution if the governments are unable to keep the promise on guarantee provision.

Real option principles are applied to assess the public–private investment proportions and the expected return rates of the private sector in a non-competitive guarantee and analyse their effects on the public–private benefit and risk allocations as well as the success of the project. Instead of granting direct capital support, this research accomplishes the compensation of non-competition guarantee by adjusting the project benefit distribution ratios between the government and the private sector to achieve the option value of the guarantee. An empirical example with alternative scales, which is developed from an existing rental village in Geelong, is used to numerically verify the research process.

The results illustrate that the option value of the non-competition guarantee plays an important role in supporting the implementation of the PPP rental retirement village projects. The option value of the non-competition guarantee has a close relationship with the guarantee level and the government guarantee cost, which is positively correlated with the guarantee level and negatively correlated with the government guarantee cost. To reduce the government guarantee cost, the government should carefully determine the public–private investment proportion, appropriately control the return rate of the private sector and approve the construction of the new project after the investment recovery of the private sector.

This research mainly focusses on the economic loss of the government due to the guarantee responsibility. Further research could be conducted to determine the guarantee level more precisely and take the social cost of the government guarantees into consideration.

This research is the first attempt to investigate the government compensation and costs of non-competition guarantee for PPP rental retirement village projects and will enhance the understanding of the nature of PPP applications. The evaluation process and the implementation of the compensation through the adjustment of benefit distribution provides a comprehensive method to analyse the non-competition guarantee of PPP projects and help the parties negotiate in good faith to agree on a method of redress.

This study is aimed to explore the dynamic performance incentive model for a flexible PPP contract to handle uncertainties based on supervision during the long-time concession period, so as to ensure operation performance and benefits of the public sector while protecting the economic benefit of the private sector, thus avoiding unnecessary renegotiation.

The microeconomic and principal–agent theories and relevant studies on the basic incentive model and flexible contract are fully utilized. The procedure for developing the dynamic incentive model and the assumptions about the quantitative relationships among fundamental variables or factors are first proposed. The static incentive model without incentive parameter adjustment and then the dynamic incentive model allowing incentive parameter adjustment are successively developed. Finally, the propositions regarding the valid adjustment ranges of the incentive parameter with respect to the economic, social and hybrid benefits of the public sector and the economic benefit of the private sector are suggested.

The dynamic incentive model enables to achieve a flexible contract to handle uncertainties on the PPP project to ensure the benefits of the public sector while protecting the benefit of the private sector. The economic, social and hybrid benefits of the public sector and the economic benefit of the private sectors can be respectively realized through adjusting the reward–punishment coefficient under different adjustment ranges and different importance. The incentive model is able to ensure the benefits of the public sector while protecting the benefit of the private sector by controlling the private sector's effort level unknown to the public sector.

The dynamic incentive model helps implement a flexible PPP contract to handle uncertainties during the operation period, thus controlling the effort level of the private sector and ensuring the benefits of the public sector while protecting the economic benefit of the sector. It enables to clarify the quantitative relationships between the operation performance, the benefits of the stakeholders, the effort level of the private sector and the reward–punishment coefficient. This study contributes to the domain knowledge of the incomplete contract theory for designing a flexible PPP contract with dynamic incentive and supervision mechanism by applying the microeconomic and principal–agent theories.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Taiwan’s “Stars Policy” for university admission can fulfill its major aim to promote educational equity. Implemented by the government, the policy relies on student within-school ranks to admit high achievers to top universities or departments, mainly in medicine.

Open data were collected from the government, universities, high schools, and news reports. High schools were identified as having benefited from the Stars Policy if more students were accepted into medical departments in the first year of the policy than one year before its implementation. χ² tests and logistic regression were used to examine how the benefit status interacted with school types and regions.

The results indicated that the Stars Policy benefited 25 high schools, namely, 9 community public schools (not top achieving in a region) and 16 struggling private schools (especially vocational). Contrary to expectations, private schools were three times as likely and private school students seven times as likely to have benefited from the Stars Policy. Schools located in disadvantaged regions did not benefit.

The Stars Policy is unique given its centralized and school-based system. The design, however, increases educational equity in a manner that fails to benefit disadvantaged students seeking admission to the top-achieving medical departments in Taiwan.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on adoption of certified management standards, specifically public standards. Such standards play an increasingly important role in today’s business environment. However, to generate adoption benefits, they must be first widely accepted – a situation where they have become viewed as the de facto norms. For this state to occur early adopters play a critical role. Past research has argued that early adopters, in exchange for assuming more risk, are rewarded with higher economic returns. Yet, these findings are based on private, not public standards. With public standards, early adopters do not receive such benefits. There is evidence that public standards are becoming more important. This situation leads to a simple but important question addressed in this study – if early adopters assume the risks of embracing a new public standard without economic benefits, then what is their motivation? To resolve this question, this study draws on agency theory and prospect theory. The authors argue that early adopters embrace such standards because of their desire to minimize risk resulting from failure to support the goal at the heart of the public standards.

Data were obtained from the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) Partners Cost Benefit Survey and analyzed through structural equation modeling.

Early adopters of public standards are not driven by economic benefits but rather by the need to minimize their exposure to the risks associated with failing to satisfy the goals associated with a public standard. In other words, they were motivated by the need to minimize costs. In the case of C-TPAT, these costs are those of failing to provide or improve network security.

This study has shed new light on the standards adoption process by clarifying the specific motivations that drive early adoption of a public standard. In addition to identifying the loss aversion motives of early adopters and economic benefit motives of later adopters, the authors have also elaborated on the notion that standards have differing levels of precedence, particularly when comparing private with public standards.

In a world characterized by increasing demands for outcomes such as improved security and where governmental funding is falling, due to growing deficits and governments that are becoming more conservative, the authors expect the use of public standards to increase.

Different from prior research on private standard, the paper focuses on the organizations involved in the adoption and diffusion of a public standard, with special attention being devoted to the early adopters. The paper provides a theoretical explanation for the actions of early adopters of a public standard through the theoretical lens of prospect theory.

Compensation systems serve a critical role in strategic human resources management, and over the past twenty-five years, there have been an increasing number of public sector reform efforts aimed at better aligning compensation practices with institutional workforce needs. While many past reforms have been performance driven, the nationʼs most recent economic downturn has served as potent catalyst for a renewed focus on public sector compensation, particularly reforms to public sector retirement benefits. However, given the traditional importance of public sector retirement benefits within broader bureaucratic structures, these new reforms hold the potential to substantially alter human capital capacity in the public sector. Using wage and retirement benefit data from the U.S. Census Bureauʼs Current Population Survey and National Compensation Survey, this paper finds that state and local governments face significant threats to their long-term human capital capacity in light of potential benefit reforms that place a disproportionate emphasis upon competitive wage rates.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of social discount rates on the economic significance of CO₂ mitigation in the benefit‐cost analysis of recent amendments of Building Regulations Part L.

The benefit of mitigating CO₂ emission by raising the standard of building in amended building regulations is estimated by an integrated‐assessment economic model called DICE at different social discount rates proposed by economists and government.

The benefit of CO₂ mitigation is highly sensitive to the choice of social discount rate that the value of social discount rate is a crucial factor to decide the economic viability of recent and future amendments of Building Regulations Part L. The more positive the social discount rate used in the benefit‐cost analysis, the less sustainability appears to be because higher discount rate tips the balance in favour of current benefits against future costs.

This paper focuses on the impact of social discount rates on the shadow price of CO₂ emission. Further researches are needed to estimate the private benefits and costs to construct and operate buildings complying with amended Building Regulations Part L so as to produce a solid benefit‐cost analysis on the amendment of the building regulations.

If sustainable development, similar to other traditional investment, is subject to feasibility judgement in a common metric, more attentions are needed to be given by sustainability literature on the issue of discounting.

This paper for the first time evaluates the environmental benefits of amending the Building Regulations and the sensitivity of the benefits to the choice of social discount rates.

The purpose of this study is to formulate the cost of corruption and undue private benefit.

The design is based on cost formulas of the corruption already formulated, and the design of these formulas allows the calculation for Argentina in 2021 of the cost of the corruption.

The corruption cost models for bribes and cost overruns for public works are the theoretical basis for obtaining the undue private benefit. Based on the formulas developed to calculate the costs of corruption for Argentina 2021.

There are no limitations in the model.

In addition to the calculation of the cost of corruption, the formula of private profit undue by corruption is developed.

The social implications are certainty about the cost of corruption for Argentina in 2021.

The present work is original and its value is given by the formulation and practical demonstration of the cost of corruption for Argentina in 2021 and the undue private benefit.

Maximising real efficiency benefit (REB) is currently being replaced with access to private finance as core public–private partnership (PPP) adoption motive. This later choice focusses on short-term performance, compromising REB and the procurement of infrastructure that meets the need of the present and future generations, which the former accomplishes. The paper aims to review these observed changes to understand the rationales and significance behind such switch.

Secondary data powered exploratory study. Deployed X-inefficiency theory to triangulate and reduce bias and select country cases to provide the proper foundation for the descriptive “what happened?” question, such as “what was the failure concerns with a particular adoption choice?”

The shift to accessing private finance adoption motive against REB failed to improve PPP project performance or meet efficiency and sustainability. Instead, it allows the private sector to assume financial risk without synergistic monitoring from the government to determine their contractual and commitment trust level, which would help achieve the five-dimensional sustainable performance measurement system for PPP. This led to the struggles of PPP projects in Portugal and Spain, where cost overruns and high demand forecast led to project failures. A recommendation, blended finance with its technical assistance additionality, is considered pivotal to addressing access to private finance motive shortcomings.

This study improves best practices for new and existing adopters by systematically establishing that adoption ideology is a cardinal variable that influences PPP project success. When not correctly adopted, it can make the most successful structured projects face complexities and uncertainty.