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The purpose of this paper is to examine the certification and monitoring motivations of third-party underwriting and its effects on credit spreads and earnings management of bank issuers.

Ordinary least squares is used to examine the certification and monitoring effects of third-party underwriting. Furthermore, the Heckman two-stage estimation method is used in controlling the endogeneity of sample selection.

The authors find that financial bonds underwritten by third-party underwriters bear lower credit spreads due to their credibly ex ante certification and effectively ex post monitoring compared with self-underwriting. Moreover, the certification of third-party underwriters can help to select good quality bond issuers with lower earnings management, and the monitoring function also plays an essential role in constraining the behavior of earnings management after the bond issues.

The findings in this study suggest that underwriting types (third-party underwriting) will affect financial bond yields and bank issuers’ earnings management.

On the one hand, the authors should encourage third-party underwriters to actively promote the certification and monitoring functions. For example, given commercial banks the chance to be underwriters when the bond issuers are investment banks, which is not allowed now in China’s financial bond market. On the other hand, the authors should cut off the quid pro quo relations within third-party underwriting because such relations will reduce the certification and monitoring effects of third-party underwriters.

This is the first study to distinguish the certification and monitoring effects by using unique data from China’s financial bond market. And the authors further investigate the adverse effects of quid pro quo relations (hiring each other as lead underwriters) on the certification and monitoring effects of third-party underwriters.

May 10, 1967 Insurance — Employer's liability — Breach by brokers of contract to obtain employer's liability insurance — Damage flowing — Condition precedent in form of policy envisaged that employers should take reasonable precautions to prevent accidents — Accident to employee — Negligence and breach of statutory duty to fence dangerous machine established against employers — Risk not appreciated by employers — Whether employers would have been indemnified by insurers — “Reasonable precautions” — Whether necessary to establish their legal liability to do so — Whether probability of payment as matter of business policy sufficient.

The aim of this research is to contribute to the existing literature about the entrepreneurial conditions in crowd-based contexts by describing how different European countries regulate equity crowdfunding market in order to incentive the investments and protect investors.

Based on a legal acts' analysis, we conduct a qualitative study comparing the crowdfunding regulation addressed to investors. In particular, we focus our analysis on the European countries with the highest concentration of crowdfunding platforms (i.e. the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain).

The results show that some countries, such as the UK, Germany and France, present an investor-oriented approach based on non-restrictive regulation, while other countries, such as Spain and Italy, have a restrictive approach that protects investors excessively and discourages them. In particular, the case study of France shows how the introduction of unrestricted regulation can produce positive effects on the volume of crowdfunding transactions.

The paper is addressed to investors, policymakers and intermediaries (platforms) to help the first in orienting themselves between the different crowdfunding regulations and the latter in aligning and orchestrating rules and norms.

This is the first study that analyses the role of investor-oriented regulations in the promotion of entrepreneurship through the identification of four key factors to monitor equity crowdfunding regulations.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate classical elite theory into theories of constitutional bargains.

Qualitative methods/surveys/case studies.

Open-ended constitutional entrepreneurship cannot be forestalled. Constitutional entrepreneurs will almost always be social elites.

The research yields a toolkit for analysing constitutional bargains. It needs to be used in historical settings to acquire greater empirical content. Need to be applied to concrete historical cases to do economic history. Right now it is still only institutionally contingent theory.

Formal constitutions do not, and cannot, bind. Informal constitutions can, but they are continually evolving due to elite pressure group behaviors.

Liberalism needs another method to institutionalize itself!

Open-ended nature of constitutional bargaining overlooked in orthodox institutional entrepreneurship/constitutional economics literature.

The concept of contract contributes extensively to an essentialist conception of the organization (the contract would then be its essence), a descriptive method (describing the organization as a contract or set of contracts), and a normative standpoint. More recently, it has been epitomized by the “psychological contract”. The concept of contract is about will, agreement, obligation, promise, commitment, staying true to one's commitments, cooperation, sanction and bond. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these manifestations prior to comparing the notion of social contract with psychological contract based on two criteria: an anthropology of the individual and an anthropology of the contract.

After delineating the notion of contract (and its correlates agency, gift, exchange and association) and reviewing the “epithet‐based” contracts, the two dimensions of the contract (social and psychological) will be addressed and compared based on two anthropologies, one of the individual and one of the contract.

This comparison underscores the relevance of contractualism today and the richness of comparing across different eras and perimeters. If these two aspects have anything in common, it is whatever links the contract with sociality.

This comparing process must underscore two limitations, namely anachronism (the two texts were written two centuries apart), and underpinning, a political underpinning in the social contract and an organizational underpinning in the psychological contract. It thus looks as though the organization was made of the same substance as the nation, which – like the notion of governance – may lead to some kind of confusion between contract and constitution, contracting power and constituent powers.

The paper discusses a key notion in political philosophy and organization science.

The paper presents a comparison between two key conceptions of the notion of contract.

Presents a report from the conference Preserving America’s Printed Resources: The Roles of Repositories, Depositories, and Collections of Record, organized by the Center for Research Libraries. This was a two‐part event held in Chicago, 21‐22 July 2003, and this report summarizes the second part, which was an extended discussion on the theme of repositories and collections of record, asking “How can libraries work together to optimize management of the nation’s knowledge resources in printed form?” The intended outcome of the discussion was to be an agenda consisting of realistic near‐ and long‐term national‐level actions, and identifying the appropriate participants in those activities and the roles those participants might play.

This study sets out to focus on understanding the linkage between product variety and performance of property/casualty insurers during underwriting cycles.

The study sample is based on 4,597 property/casualty (PC) insurers from the time period 2000‐2004. Insurers are categorized into two groups based on performance: insurers whose performance is above 0.1 standard deviation of the mean, and insurers whose performance is below 0.1 standard deviation of the mean. Later logistic regression models are used to determine the influence of product variety on the likelihood of an insurer falling into one of these groups.

Study findings indicate that insurers with greater product variety had lower performance than focused insurers during both phases of the cycle. Insurers with great product variety fared relatively better than focused insurers during the hard markets compared with soft markets.

Extant research has presented significant evidence for the existence of underwriting cycles and factors causing such cycles. However, very little is known about factors that influence performance differentials across property/casualty insurers during underwriting cycles. Using real options theory, the study initially develops a rationale explaining how product variety reduces performance during an underwriting cycle and tests for the same. Study findings show that product variety aids performance of insurance firms in hard markets and soft markets, though more so in the former. In this particular instance, for firms seeking to reduce performance, it could well be that “not putting all your eggs in one basket” may not be a bad idea after all.

Interorganizational partner selection decisions are plagued with uncertainty. When making partnering decisions, firms strive to answer two questions: does the prospective partner have resources which can be used to generate value in the relationship; and will the partner be willing to actively share these resources and cooperate in good faith? Answers to these questions help reduce three types of uncertainty – partner capability uncertainty, partner competitiveness uncertainty and partner reliability uncertainty. For a relationship to benefit both partners, they have to possess complimentary resources of comparable quality, avoid explicit competition as well as be willing to engage in the cooperative behaviors within the confines of their relationship. In this paper, we examine the importance of prospective partners’ characteristics (differences in size, status and specialization) as well as their network characteristics (existence of a common partner and membership in the same clique) to the formation and longevity of their social relationships, as these characteristics reduce firms’ value generation and partner reliability uncertainty.

Public reports of provider-specific patient outcomes aim to help consumers select suppliers of medical services. Yet, in an environment of rapidly changing medical technology and increasingly heterogeneous patient populations, and because they necessarily reflect the experience of other patients who received care in the past, such reports may be of limited value in helping patients forecast the probability of an adverse outcome for each provider they are considering. I propose that providers underwrite insurance policies that promptly pay patients a predetermined sum after an adverse outcome. Patients can use such outcome warranties to infer quality differences among providers easily and reliably. In addition, outcome warranties efficiently reward both providers and patients for reducing the risk of adverse outcomes and thereby improve the safety and affordability of health care. As such, outcome warranties help advance four important goals of health care management: reduction of financial risk, recruitment and retention of physicians, remediation of adverse outcomes, and raising the provider's reputation.