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This paper aims to examine the impact of public scrutiny on chief executive officer (CEO) compensation at Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 firms.

This paper uses the unique opportunity provided by the 2008 financial crisis and, in particular, government support and legislated compensation restrictions in the US Department of the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). It aggregates monetary and non-monetary executive compensation information from 2006 to 2012, with firm- and manager-level data. It presents univariate summary compensation results and uses multivariate regression analysis to isolate the impact of public scrutiny and legislated compensation restrictions on executive pay.

Overall, the results are consistent, with increased public scrutiny having a lasting impact on perks and temporary impact on wage and legislated compensation restrictions having a temporary impact on wage. Changes in specific perk items provide evidence on which perks firms perceive as excessive and which provide common value.

The paper contributes to the discussion of perks as excess by introducing a novel data set of perk compensation at S&P500 firms and by studying how firms choose to alter levels of specific perk items in response to increased public scrutiny and legislated compensation restrictions. The paper contributes to the literature on executive pay as there has been little inquiry into the impact of public scrutiny on compensation. Public scrutiny could be an important source of external governance if firms change behavior in response to explicit and implicit scrutiny costs.

What difference is the operation of local authority health scrutiny making to the oversight and democratisation of decision making by health bodies? This article provides an insight into how a group of local authorities in England tackled the operation of a specific joint health scrutiny committee. This example highlights building relations with associated health bodies and other local authorities, choice of health scrutiny agenda, ways of working, capacity of committees, ambiguities within the policy itself, and the difficulties and challenges of adding meaningful democratic oversight to the decision‐making processes of NHS bodies. This review highlights some of the benefits of health scrutiny, but suggests that engaging more fully with patients and the public in such reviews could result in a more influential and inclusive process.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the possible implications for health scrutiny in England of changes being made/consulted upon resulting from the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Analysis of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, associated secondary legislation and a review of the existing literature on health scrutiny over the last 10 years.

Health scrutiny legislation is in need of review, especially since the changes to the health care system introduced by the recent Health and Social Care Act 2012. The Department of Health has recently consulted on possible changes to be implemented from April 2013. If health scrutiny can become embedded in local commissioning processes, there is potential for health services appropriate to local populations to be more effectively provided within the current financially challenging environment.

Little has been written on health scrutiny in recent years. This article looks at the potential impacts on and opportunities for health scrutiny under the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

This paper aims to examine empirically whether the system of public expenditure reporting is capable of delivering financial accountability, focusing on the UK government's use of private finance for roads.

Publicly available documents from the public and private sector partners for 11 roads contracts are examined, together with a publicly provided bridge paid for via tolls as a comparator.

Reporting by both public and private sectors is limited and opaque, such that accountability to the public is inadequate. The evidence also shows that the scale of the additional expenditure generated by private finance warrants greater disclosure and scrutiny than is currently the case.

These findings, which occur in the roads sector where projects are large and visible, are likely to be replicated elsewhere in the public sector. Accountability issues may be even more problematic in public bodies where reporting is more diffuse. Furthermore, the proliferation of other forms of private finance increases the problems of reporting clear financial information, the lack of which not only makes informed public debate about public and fiscal policy impossible but also may lead to the wrong policy choice.

There has been little ex post facto examination as to whether extant reporting requirements permit understanding and scrutiny of the cost of private finance. The paper presents a desired list of annual disclosure, highlighting an information gap.

By mobilizing the empirical setting of a megaproject, this study problematizes public budgeting as participatory practice. The authors suggest that megaprojects are prone to democratic legitimacy challenges due to a long history of cost overruns, which provides stakeholders with a chance to dramatize a budgetary controversy.

Through article and document data, the authors reconstructed a controversy that emerged around the budget of Stockholm/Åre’s candidature for the Olympic Winter Games 2026. The authors used Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) orders of worth to systematically analyze the justification work of key stakeholder groups involved in the controversy.

This study illustrates that a budgetary controversy was actively maintained by stakeholder groups, which resulted in a lack of public support and the eventual demise of the Olympic candidature. As such, the authors provide a more nuanced understanding of public budgeting as a controversy-based process vis-à-vis a wider public with regard to the broken institution of megaprojects.

This study suggests more attention to the disruptive power of public scrutiny and the dramatization of budgeting in megaprojects. In this empirical case, the authors show how stakeholders tend to take their technical concerns too far in order to challenge a budget, even though megaprojects generally provide an ill-suited setting for accurate forecasts.

While studies around the financial legacies of megaprojects have somewhat matured, very few have looked at pitching them. However, the authors argue that megaprojects are increasingly faced with financial skepticism upon their approval upfront.

As part of the UK’s major policy of constitutional devolution, the first Scottish Parliament in 300 years was established in Summer 1999. This paper examines how that decentralisation of political decision making is connected to organisational excellence in the Scottish public sector via Governmental policy on public management. The paper focuses on both UK and Scottish Government management of the wider Scottish public sector. Some policies and practices arise from devolution; some are coincident with it. Overall, they comprise an unprecedented mix. The paper concludes that, following the establishment of the Parliament, no single policy promotes organisational excellence; devolution has already led to significant change; territorial policy discretion is an important factor; overall, the pursuit of organisational excellence in the Scottish public sector is enjoying considerable attention; existing discussion of “new public management” may have to be updated.

We argue that the influence of public stakeholders (the state) and private stakeholders (nonstate social or economic stakeholders) on corporate philanthropy is interdependent, in that satisfying the state may increase the degree of scrutiny and pressure exerted by private stakeholders on the firm, particularly in institutional environments that place few checks and balances on the power of the state – thus creating suspicion that political patronage shelters firms’ social and moral wrongdoing. To test this theory, we examine the circumstances under which politically patronized firms engage more (or less) in corporate philanthropy. Utilizing a dataset that encompasses both publically traded and unlisted private firms in China, we find that corporate philanthropy is negatively associated with political patronage among unlisted firms but positively associated with political patronage among listed firms. These results are consistent with the predictions made based on our theoretical arguments. This chapter aims to foster further discussion regarding the interdependence of the influences exerted by different stakeholders on firms.

We examine earnings management in non-publicly listed companies, with a focus on for-profit (FP) hospice organizations, and extend the accounting earnings management literature to the hospice industry. FP hospice organizations file Medicare cost reports that include complete financial statements not otherwise publicly available. Managers of FP hospice organizations have incentives to manage earnings to increase performancebased bonuses, meet or beat bond covenant requirements, or avoid public scrutiny. We find total accruals are significantly positively associated with profitability, debt, and size factors. However, discretionary accruals are significantly negatively associated with debt and size, but not profitability. Thus, monitoring and political cost factors appear to effectively mitigate earnings management in this industry sector.

Emotions, understood as evolving mental states, are pivotal in shaping individuals“' decision-making, especially in ambiguous information evaluation, probability estimation of events, and causality analysis. Public–private partnership (PPP) projects represent a confluence of “economic–environmental–social” dimensions, wherein stakeholder behavior follows the sequential progression of “cognition–emotion–action.” Consequently, comprehending the effects of emotional shifts on stakeholder's decision-making processes is vital to fostering the sustainability of PPP projects.

The paper utilizes rank-dependent expected utility and evolutionary game theory to systematically examine the influence of emotional factors on stakeholders' behavior and decision-making processes within PPP projects. The paper integrates three emotional state functions—optimism, pessimism and rationality—into the PPP framework, highlighting the intricate interactions among the government, private sector, surrounding public and the media. Furthermore, the paper amalgamates the evolutionary pathways of environmental rights incidents with the media's role. Through equilibrium analysis and numerical simulation, the paper delves into the diverse interplay of emotions across different phases of the environmental rights incident, assessing the impact of these emotions on the evolutionary game's equilibrium results.

Emotions significantly influence the microlevel decisions of PPP stakeholders, adapting continually based on event dynamics and media influences. When the private sector demonstrates optimism and the surrounding public leans toward rationality or pessimism, the likelihood of the private sector engaging in speculative behavior escalates, while the surrounding public refrains from adopting a supervisory strategy. Conversely, when the private sector is pessimistic and the public is optimistic, the system fails to evolve a stable strategy. However, when government regulation intensifies, the private sector opts for a nonspeculative strategy, and the surrounding public adopts a supervisory strategy. Under these conditions, the system attains a relatively optimal state of equilibrium.

The paper develops a game model to examine the evolutionary dynamics between the surrounding public and private sectors concerning environmental rights protection in waste incineration PPP projects. It illuminates the nature of the conflicting interests among project participants, delves into the impact of emotional factors on their decision-making processes and offers crucial perspectives for the governance of such partnerships. Furthermore, this paper provides substantive recommendations for emotional oversight to enhance governance efficacy.