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As demands on global water resources intensify, battles are emerging over water ownership and governance. Evidence to support opposing views is scarce, however, especially with respect to the impact of ownership on water quality. Using a data set of 168,823 municipal water systems in the United States from 2010 to 2014, we find evidence that stakeholder attention moderates the effect of ownership on compliance with drinking water quality standards. Private systems’ compliance improves more rapidly with system size, consistent with greater social movement pressure, while public systems’ compliance improves more rapidly with local educational attainment, consistent with greater responsiveness to stakeholder attention and concern.

This paper aims to investigate the effect that ownership structure (public vs private) has on the demand for high-quality auditors, specifically in the US banking industry.

The authors predict that public banks are more likely to hire a high-quality auditor than private banks and pay a higher audit fee premium for that high-quality auditor (due to higher agency costs, more demand for financial information and higher litigation risk). The authors analyze 2008–2014 banking data from the Federal Reserve using probit and OLS regression analysis to examine if there is a higher probability that public banks choose higher quality auditors and pay higher audit fees when they do so.

The results show that private banks are less likely to hire Big 4 auditors and industry-expert auditors than public banks. The authors also find that both private and public banks pay higher audit fees for Big 4 and industry-expert auditors, and that public banks pay a higher premium for Big 4 auditors and industry experts than private banks.

The findings may not be fully generalizable to other types of firms, as banking is a heavily regulated and complex industry. However, inferences from this study may be generalizable to other similar industries such as insurance or health care.

The results of this paper imply that public and private banks have differing priorities when hiring their financial statement auditor. This may be of interest to investors and auditing regulators.

The findings of this paper underscore the value of hiring an industry-expert auditor in an industry that is highly complex and regulated. This may be of interest to managers and policymakers.

Due to data restrictions, the emphasis of prior literature on the banking industry has been on public banks. This study is the first to analyze the differences between public and private banks’ demand for audit services.

The literature shows a paradox in the understanding of the relationship between structural complexity (defined as the diversity of services offered by an organization) and customer satisfaction. Structural complexity tends to be a popular strategy designed to satisfy different customer needs. However, a negative relationship between structural complexity and customer satisfaction has also been argued. Based on the research on the public versus private distinction, this paper proposes that type of ownership is associated with the paradox mentioned, moderating the relationship between structural complexity and customer satisfaction. The authors tested this hypothesis using a sample of 60 managers and 897 customers of service organizations. The results indicated that as structural complexity increases, public organizations are less able to maintain customer satisfaction than private organizations. Ownership appeared to be an important contingency factor in understanding the paradoxical relationship between service structural complexity and customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to guide the formation and to determine the structure of new governmental entrepreneurial ventures based on the nature of the public goods and the need for an entrepreneurial orientation.

This paper is conceptual and is based on reviews of appropriate organizational structure and entrepreneurship, cases studies, and the authors' experiences.

Public or quasi‐public entities may need to change their organizational structure in order to act more entrepreneurially and to be more effective in accomplishing their missions. Propositions are raised to guide the development of new public or private enterprises and provide the basis for future research.

This paper is conceptual and needs to be tested empirically. Though other levels of government and countries were included, a major focus is on the US federal government.

This is the first published research on the topic of new enterprise government structures based on the nature of the goods and the requisite entrepreneurial orientation. It will help governmental and quasi‐governmental organizations in developing efficient and effective organizational structures.

This paper aims to examine whether the mode of privatisation and the subsequent ownership structure affects post‐privatisation performance.

Utilising a theoretically derived sample of two matched telecommunications firms in New Zealand and Australia, and non‐parametric analysis of financial data, the performance of two forms of privatisation are compared: full privatisation via direct sale to foreign anchor investors versus partial privatisation via a domestic share issue restricting foreign ownership.

Concentrated ownership through direct sales to foreign owned anchor investors is not more efficient or profitable, nor does it result in increased capital investment; it does, however, result in higher dividend payouts.

These findings contradict the accepted wisdom and dominant theory in the field that full privatisation outperforms partial privatisation, and that FDI transfers firm‐specific ownership advantages enabling the recipient to outperform domestically owned firms. However, the findings are applicable to the two firms and countries studied and future studies need to extend these to the wider population of privatised firms.

While privatisation will improve organisational performance, the choice of whether to privatise by direct sale to anchor investors and foreign owners versus a partial share issue privatisation and keeping a domestic focus will have post‐privatisation performance implications.

A more nuanced understanding is provided of the performance implications of modes of divestiture and ownership structures in advanced economies.

This paper aims to examine the effect of state ownership on bank performance for all banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries during the period 2003 – 2018, for two distinct banking systems: the conventional and the Islamic banking systems.

To achieve the goal of the study, this paper uses a mean t-test to examine the mean difference of the related variables for both banking systems, and a regression test (using the GMM method) to explore the effect of state ownership on bank performance.

The most important result of the analysis is that state ownership has a significantly positive influence on bank performance for conventional banks but not for Islamic banks, in the GCC area.

This study adds to the scarce related literature comparative empirical results with respect to the impact of ownership on the performance of two different banking systems: the conventional system and the Islamic banking system in the GCC area. This study is likely to have implications for policymakers in terms of developing rules relevant to the governance of GCC’s two banking systems that can help to support the stability of the whole banking sector.

We discuss the ways in which the tensions between deregulation and bailouts create fundamentally inefficient markets. Although there is an appetite for the rhetoric of a laissez-fair economic system in the United States, we do not have the political will to operate such a system, as there are always cries for bailouts when a crisis emerges. And bailouts rob markets of the crucial ability to discipline capital for risky behavior. Using the case of China as an example, we argue that the post-Cold War conclusion that state ownership is fundamentally inefficient is premature. The key issue is not state versus private ownership per se but, rather, how well aligned the incentives are within a given system. Some of the economic models we find in reform-era China are actually better aligned and perhaps as transparent as their counterparts in the market economies of the capitalist West. Finally, because China is not caught up on the categorical assumption that private firms are efficient while state-owned firms are inefficient, the country has been able to be an institutional innovator in the area of public–private partnerships, leading to radical new corporate forms.

Questions the meanings of the economic concepts which are usually taken for granted by many economics textbooks. Discusses notions of “property” (including actual, legal, private and public property), “possession”, “market”, “capitalism”, “socialism”, “communism” and “planning”, all of which are customarily used in these textbooks as the given institutional framework within which each modern industrial economies operate.

The purpose of this study is to examine three electric utilities, two publicly owned and one privately owned. The basis of this examination is legitimacy theory employing a small sample case‐type approach. In particular we are interested in social and environmental disclosures found in annual reports and how these disclosures differentiate between publicly owned and privately owned enterprises. In our examination we use some traditional efficiency measures but we also employ effectiveness measures relying on the proprietary costs and information costs views in our analysis. Our major findings are that ownership status and size, which are likely to affect legitimacy, influence the amount of social and environmental disclosure. Finally, while environmental disclosures seem to be related to information costs and benefits, this relationship does not seem to hold for social disclosures.

The purpose of this study is to review the capital budgeting literature over the past decade.

Specifically, over the years 2004–2013, we review works appearing in the major academic journals in accounting, finance, and management. Further, we review the specialized academic journals in management accounting. We examine the frequency of articles by journal and year published, the type of research method applied, and the topic area studied. We then review the research findings by topic area.

We find 110 articles appearing in the selected journals. While the articles increase in frequency, the research methods applied are predominantly analytical and archival in nature with relatively few experiments, case studies, or surveys. Some progress is observed for capital budgeting techniques and new methods for structuring uncertainty. The studies find that the size of capital budgets is about right for companies with high financial reporting quality, for liquid companies, during periods of normal cash flow, when the budget is financed by equity, for companies when they first go public or first go private. Tax rates and financial reporting methods for depreciation and tax expenses distort capital budgets. Organization structure and performance measurement can distort capital budgeting. Individual differences, especially optimism and honesty, can influence capital budgeting decisions.

This review is limited to the major journals in accounting, finance, and management; and the specialized journals in management accounting. There is much research to be done on capital budgeting, especially case studies of actual practice and experiments related to individual and group decision processes.