Too Hard to Shout Over the Loudest Frame: Effects of Competing Frames in the Context of the Crystallized Media Coverage on Offshore Outsourcing

This study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshore outsourcing, an issue that is characterized by a predominantly negative, unemployment-focused media framing. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N = 152) demonstrate that conventional framing effects do hold for this issue and for this media context by moving recipients’ attitudes in the direction consistent with the valence of the frame. However, they also show the backfire effect of the positively valenced frame among recipients with greater interest in political and economic news, who become less supportive of outsourcing if they read a story framing outsourcing from a consumer-oriented perspective. Our results contribute to the ongoing debate about the limits of framing effects on forming opinion about contentious policy issues and demonstrate the challenges for nondominant perspectives to make their way to news-savvy audiences even when the nature of the issue in question necessitates considering them.     

Human capital and agency effects on CEO compensation of IPO biopharmaceutical firms and the market’s response

This paper examines the determinants of base pay and total incentive compensation packages of CEOs of biopharmaceutical firms that have recently gone public, and whether human capital and agency factors affect the market’s response to the initial public offering. We find that in terms of net proceeds, the IPO market appears to reward the firms that have founder-CEOs and CEOs with higher incentive compensation. CEOs with prior venture capital experience are associated with receiving higher incentive compensation, while CEOs with a greater ownership interest in the firm receive lower incentive compensation but higher salaries. CEOs of firms with a greater percentage of insiders are associated with lower salaries. The results should add to our understanding related to human capital and agency theories, as well as help firms and investors better understand and structure CEO compensation.     

More than Face Value: Context and Age Differences in Negative Emotion Discrimination

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior - Age-related deficits are often observed in emotion categorization tasks that include negative emotional expressions like anger, fear, and sadness. Stimulus...     

Can Children Recognize Bodily Expressions of Emotion?

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior - Past research has demonstrated that children understand distinct emotion concepts and can accurately recognize facial expressions of distinct emotions by a young...     

Random effects regression mixtures for analyzing infant habituation

Random effects regression mixture models are a way to classify longitudinal data (or trajectories) having possibly varying lengths. The mixture structure of the traditional random effects regression mixture model arises through the distribution of the random regression coefficients, which is assumed to be a mixture of multivariate normals. An extension of this standard model is presented that accounts for various levels of heterogeneity among the trajectories, depending on their assumed error structure. A standard likelihood ratio test is presented for testing this error structure assumption. Full details of an expectation-conditional maximization algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation are also presented. This model is used to analyze data from an infant habituation experiment, where it is desirable to assess whether infants comprise different populations in terms of their habituation time.     

The Effect of Mergers and Acquisitions on Employees: Wealth Transfer,Gain‐Sharing or Pain‐Sharing?

This paper considers whether gains made by shareholders from corporate takeovers are achieved at the expense of employees, as proposed by the ‘wealth transfer’ perspective. It analyses the contribution of employee lay‐offs, along with employment and wage changes, to the takeover premium and abnormal share price movements. The analysis draws on a unique dataset of British takeovers, combining documentary, share price and accounting data. The results show that lay‐offs planned at the takeover have either no effect or adverse effects on shareholder returns. Wages growth is positively, not inversely, related to shareholder returns from the second year after the takeover, whilst positive employment changes have a similar effect in the following year. Closer scrutiny indicates that labour and shareholders share gains when the firm does well, but share pain when it does not. There is evidence, therefore, that labour and shareholder interests can be complementary, rather than antagonistic, after takeovers.