Pre‐Going Private Ownership Around the World

Going private transactions are often highly leveraged, and give rise to potential agency conflicts among existing shareholders. But who exactly are those shareholders, and under what legal conditions are these transactions more likely to occur? We examine ownership structure prior to going private transactions in 33 countries around the world from 2002 to 2014. The data indicate strong and consistent evidence that pre‐going private ownership is characterized by higher institutional and corporate ownership. Family ownership lowers the probability of a public to private transaction. Stronger creditor rights increase the probability of going private, particularly for whole company and institutional buyouts.     

International Business and Entrepreneurship Implications of Brexit

This paper provides an overview of the international business and entrepreneurship implications of Brexit. Our perspective is preliminary and based on a review of the practitioner, policy and academic literature over the first month following the Brexit vote. We highlight some of the potentially negative consequences for markets in the UK and around the world that result from barriers to trade and immigration associated with the uncertainty created by Brexit.     

Contested Terrain of the Global Fisheries: “Dolphin-Safe” Tuna,The Panama Declaration,and the Marine Stewardship Council1

ABSTRACT The globalization of socio-economic relations is a central topic of discussion in both the general literature on economy and society and in the area of food and agriculture. Many maintain that we are in a transition from one era, termed Fordism, to another, called Global Post-Fordism. We use the case of two fisheries eco-labeling programs to inform discussions regarding the emergence of stabilizing socio-economic mechanisms in the Global Post-Fordist era. We argue that recent developments in the tuna-dolphin case, the first major experiment with eco-labeling in the fisheries industries, combined with the Marine Stewardship Council, an initiative designed to regulate and certify a system of global “sustainable fisheries” through an eco-labeling program, provide valuable insights into the ideological and organizational structure of salient global actors in the Post-Fordist era. The discussion addresses (1) the contested terrain within the “North” and between the “North” and the “South” regarding eco-legislation to regulate the global fisheries; (2) the fracturing of the environmental movement into “mainstream” and “grassroots” camps and the resulting inability to maintain a coordinated agenda to counter the globalization project; and (3) the emergence of new forms of supranational state-like regulatory mechanisms that combine science with free trade and environmental ideals and propose to resolve the global fisheries crises by providing sustainable socio-economic coordination. We conclude that the emergence of these supra-national state-like NGOs raises important implications for the sovereignty of nation-states and democratic action on the part of subordinate groups opposed to the globalization project.     

What Critical Demography Means to Me

Sociological Forum -     

An Exploratory Analysis of the Value of the Skills of IT Personnel: Their Relationship to IS Infrastructure and Competitive Advantage

Determining and assessing the requisite skills of information technology (IT) personnel have become critical as the value of IT has risen in modern organizations. In addition to technical skills traditionally expected of IT personnel, softer skills like managerial, business, and interpersonal skills have been increasingly cited in previous studies as mandatory for these employees. This paper uses a typology of IT personnel skills—technology management skills, business functional skills, interpersonal skills, and technical skills—and investigates their relationships to two information systems (IS) success variables, IS infrastructure flexibility and the competitive advantage provided by IS. The study investigates these relationships using the perceptions of chief information officers (CIOs) from mostly Fortune 2000 companies. The contributions of this study are: IT personnel skills do affect IS success, technical skills are viewed as the most important skill set in affecting IS infrastructure flexibility and competitive advantage, and modularity is viewed as more valuable to competitive advantage than integration. Several explanations are offered for the lack of positive relationships between the softer IT personnel skills and the dimensions of IS success used in this study.     

Sex Differences in Parenting Behaviors in Single‐Mother and Single‐Father Households

Research on family structure has led some to claim that sex‐based parenting differences exist. But if such differences exist in single‐parent families, the absence of a second parent rather than specific sex‐typed parenting might explain them. We examine differences in mothering and fathering behavior in single‐parent households, where number of parents is held constant, and we describe individualist and structuralist perspectives for potential sex‐based parenting behaviors. We compare 3,202 single mothers and 307 single fathers in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten Cohort). Results suggest that, although there are small differences in the parenting behaviors of single mothers and single fathers, differences are sensitive to demographic disparities and do not translate to academic deficits for children in either family type.     

Multistate Survival Models as Transient Electrical Networks

In multistate survival analysis, the sojourn of a patient through various clinical states is shown to correspond to the diffusion of 1 C of electrical charge through an electrical network. The essential comparison has differentials of probability for the patient to correspond to differentials of charge, and it equates clinical states to electrical nodes. Indeed, if the death state of the patient corresponds to the sink node of the circuit, then the transient current that would be seen on an oscilloscope as the sink output is a plot of the probability density for the survival time of the patient. This electrical circuit analogy is further explored by considering the simplest possible survival model with two clinical states, alive and dead (sink), that incorporates censoring and truncation. The sink output seen on an oscilloscope is a plot of the Kaplan–Meier mass function. Thus, the Kaplan–Meier estimator finds motivation from the dynamics of current flow, as a fundamental physical law, rather than as a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimate (MLE). Generalization to competing risks settings with multiple death states (sinks) leads to cause‐specific Kaplan–Meier submass functions as outputs at sink nodes. With covariates present, the electrical analogy provides for an intuitive understanding of partial likelihood and various baseline hazard estimates often used with the proportional hazards model.