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This paper seeks to examine the relationship between board committees and firm performance and the moderating effect of family ownership for public companies in Hong Kong.

This study employs publicly available data from financial databases and annual reports of a sample of 346 firm‐year observations of public companies in Hong Kong for the periods 2001‐2003.

The empirical evidence indicates that a nomination (remuneration) committee is positively (negatively) related to firm performance, depending on the independence of its composition. Furthermore, family ownership does have an adverse effect on the relationship between board committees, specifically the remuneration committee, and the performance of public companies in Hong Kong.

This study is based on publicly available data and the board process is not actually observed.

The effectiveness of a board committee is contingent on its independence and family ownership.

This paper provides empirical evidence that an independent board committee could enhance the corporate governance of public companies in Hong Kong and would be of interest to regulatory bodies, business practitioners, and academic researchers.

This paper aims to characterize those who take part in three different type religious activities (prayers, monetary donations and worship attendances) in the USA using 1972-2010 General Social Survey pooled data.

The authors have identified factors that affect each activity using Tobit analysis.

There are only three common factors (marriage, race and parental background) that influence all of these three activities and the directions of impacts are not the same. Black churchgoers are more engaging in all of these three activities, the same is true for those whose parents attend church regularly. However, marriage has positive impacts on both worship attendances and monetary donations, but has negative impacts on prayers.

This paper contributes by breaking down giving into three categories and using 38 years of pooled data in the US General Social Survey.

Church giving and attendance are two important indicators of church health and performance. In the literature, they are usually understood to be simultaneously determined. The purpose of this paper is to estimate if there a sustainable church congregation size using Wintrobe’s (1998) dictatorship model. The authors want to examine the impact of youth and adult ministry as well.

Using the data collected from among Canadian Baptist churches in Eastern Canada, this study investigates the factors affecting the level of the two indicators by the panel-instrumental variable technique. Applying Wintrobe’s (1998) political economy model on dictatorship, the equilibrium level of worship attendance and giving is predicted.

Through various simulation exercises, the actual church congregation sizes is approximately 50 percent of the predicted value, implying inefficiency and misallocation of church resources. The paper concludes with insights on effective ways church leaders can allocate scarce resources to promote growth within churches.

The authors are the only researchers getting the permission from the Atlantic Canada Baptist Convention to use their mega data set on church giving and congregation sizes as per the authors’ knowledge. The authors are also applying a theoretical model on dictatorship to religious/not for profits organizations.

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) duality and firm performance and the moderating effects of the family control factor on this relationship with respect to public companies in Hong Kong.

This study employs publicly available data from financial databases and the annual reports of a sample of 128 publicly‐listed companies in Hong Kong in 2003.

Neither agency theory nor stewardship theory alone can adequately explain the duality‐performance relationship. The empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between CEO duality and accounting performance is contingent on the presence of the family control factor. CEO duality is good for non‐family firms, while non‐duality is good for family‐controlled firms.

The study is based on publicly available financial data, and actual board processes are not observed.

The design of board leadership structure is contingent on corporate ownership and control (family control or not).

The paper provides empirical evidence that CEO duality is not necessarily bad for public companies in Hong Kong and would be of interest to regulatory bodies, business practitioners, and academic researchers.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of research and developments relating to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education. As opposed to early educational uses of the Internet involving publication of static information on web pages, Web 2.0 tools offer a host of opportunities for educators to provide more interactive, collaborative, and creative online learning experiences for students. The chapter starts by defining Web 2.0 tools in terms of their ability to facilitate online creation, editing, and sharing of web content. A typology of Web 2.0 technologies is presented to illustrate the wide variety of tools at teachers’ disposal. Educational uses of Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, and microblogging are explored, in order to showcase the variety of designs that can be utilized. Based on a review of the research literature the educational benefits of using Web 2.0 technologies are outlined, including their ability to facilitate communication, collaborative knowledge building, student-centered activity, and vicarious learning. Similarly, issues surrounding the use of Web 2.0 tools are distilled from the literature and discussed, such as the possibility of technical problems, collaboration difficulties, and plagiarism. Two case studies involving the use Web 2.0 tools to support personalized learning and small group collaboration are detailed to exemplify design possibilities in greater detail. Finally, design recommendations for learning and teaching using Web 2.0 are presented, again based on findings from the research literature.

This paper aims to first investigate auditor change following mismatch by focusing on the number of times mismatch occurred prior to auditor change and on clients mismatched continuously with auditors for two or more years. Subsequently, it studies the relation of mismatch in the current year with auditor change for clients mismatched in the past year. These issues are important because of the call for regulatory intervention in auditor selection. If market forces achieve improvement in matching, then those forces should be relied upon in auditor selection.

This paper adapts the literature to estimate mismatch and uses logistic regressions on an auditor change model to study the timing of auditor change by mismatched clients and on a mismatch model to examine improvement in matching following auditor change.

This paper finds that the more frequent mismatches occurred in the past four years, the higher the likelihood of switching in the current year. Clients mismatched continuously for two or more years are more likely to change auditors. This paper also reports that mismatched clients who switch auditors are less likely to be mismatched again after the switch.

Because market forces reduce mismatch through auditor change, free choice by clients and auditors should be allowed, and regulatory intervention should be introduced cautiously. As investors and other users of financial statements have an interest in seeing that clients get the appropriate auditors for the audit, they will be assured that market forces could achieve the purpose. Thus, the results of this paper address public concern in the regulatory regime and support current audit market practices.

Prior studies assume a one-year time frame for auditor change to follow mismatch. This paper relaxes this assumption, to better reflect audit market practices, by showing that clients who are more often mismatched with auditors or those mismatched continuously for two or more years could also change auditors. Furthermore, prior studies find that mismatching motivates auditor change, but they do not show that matching improves after the change. This paper extends the literature by shedding new light to show that auditor change improves auditor–client matching.

Relatively few comparative studies have examined how perceptions across cultures might converge or diverge regarding careers in general and new venture careers in particular. Our research addresses this gap by providing a comparative study of career perceptions among undergraduate business students in three countries with different levels of experience with capitalism: Ukraine, South Korea, and the United States. Results suggest both surprising differences and interesting similarities between undergraduate students in the three countries with regard to how they perceive characteristics associated with entrepreneurial careers. Findings are discussed in the context of distinct differences and commonalities across cultures and implications for future research provided.

This paper aims to investigate the moderating effects of corporate governance mechanisms on the financial leverage–profitability relation in emerging market firms.

The paper examines the impacts by estimating the empirical model in which a firm’s accounting profitability is a dependent variable, while financial leverage, board size, board independence, CEO duality, CEO ownership, state ownership and the interaction variables are predictors. The paper uses the panel data set of 295 listed firms in Vietnam in the period 2011-2015 and two key econometric methods for panel data, namely, the two-stage least square instrumental variable and general moments method.

The paper finds the evidence for the significant and positive effect of board size, board independence and state ownership on the financial leverage–profitability relation. The effect of CEO duality on the financial leverage–profitability relation tends to be negative, and the impact CEO ownership inclines to be positive, although both of them are statistically insignificant. The results are consistent across different estimation methods.

This paper is the first investigating the moderating effect of various corporate governance mechanisms on the financial leverage–profitability relationship in emerging market firms.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss recent developments in school developmental supervisory evaluation in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai in the Chinese Mainland.

The main research approach is qualitative, using documentary analysis and interviews of an inspector, principals and teachers from two primary schools.

There were perceived positive and negative impacts of school supervision and evaluation.

The paper highlights the implications for fostering a shared school‐government community of school supervision and evaluation, promoting a dynamic approach for addressing contextual differences as well as achieving better coherence among educational reform, supervision and evaluation policies.