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.     

A Weighted Composite Dose – Response Model For Human Salmonellosis

This article describes the development of a weighted composite dose – response model for human salmonellosis. Data from previously reported human challenge studies were categorized into two different groups representing low and moderately virulent/pathogenic Salmonella strains based on a disease end point. Because epidemiological data indicate that some Salmonella strains are particularly pathogenic, and in the absence of human feeding study data for such strains, Shigella dysenteriae was used as a proxy for highly virulent strains. Three single-hit dose – response models were applied to the human feeding study data and evaluated for best fit using maximum likelihood estimation: (1) the exponential (E-1pop), (2) the two-subpopulation exponential (E-2pop), and (3) the Beta-Poisson (BP). Based on the goodness-of-fit test, the E-1pop and BP were the best-fit models for low and moderately virulent/pathogenic Salmonella strains, and the E-2pop and BP models were better for highly virulent/pathogenic strains. Epistemic analysis was conducted by determining the degree of confidence associated with the selected models, which was found to be 50%/50% (E-1pop/BP) for low and moderately pathogenic Salmonella strains, and 9.8%/90.2% (E-2pop/BP) for highly virulent strains. The degree of confidence for each component model and variations in the proportion of strains within each virulence/pathogenicity category were incorporated into the overall composite model. This study describes the influence of variation in strain virulence and host susceptibility on the shape of the population dose – response relationship.     

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.     

Coaching as a Packaged Intervention for Telemarketing Personnel

Prior literature indicates that although the sales function of an organization is a critical element for its success, there is a lack of research on specific actions managers can take to influence sales subordinates. The purpose of the present study was to assess the effects of a coaching package combined with incentives on sales performance for telemarketing personnel in an organizational setting. Following the implementation of the coaching package, there was a substantial increase in critical behaviors performed, pending sales set, and final sales completed by all telemarketers.     

How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis

Contemporary theories on leadership development emphasize the importance of having a leader identity in building leadership skills and functioning effectively as leaders. We build on this approach by unpacking the role leader identity plays in the leader emergence process. Taking the perspective that leadership is a dynamic social process between group members, we propose a social network-based process model whereby leader role identity predicts network centrality (i.e., betweenness and indegree), which then contributes to leader emergence. We test our model using a sample of 88 cadets participating in a leadership development training course. In support of our model, cadets who possess a stronger leader role identity at the beginning of the course were more likely to emerge as leaders. However this relationship was only mediated by one form of network centrality, indegree centrality, reflecting one's ability to build relationships within one's group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Quantifying Potential Human Health Impacts of Animal Antibiotic Use: Enrofloxacin and Macrolides in Chickens

Use of similar or identical antibiotics in both human and veterinary medicine has come under increasing scrutiny by regulators concerned that bacteria resistant to animal antibiotics will infect people and resist treatment with similar human antibiotics, leading to excess illnesses and deaths. Scientists, regulators, and interest groups in the United States and Europe have urged bans on nontherapeutic and some therapeutic uses of animal antibiotics to protect human health. Many regulators and public health experts have also expressed dissatisfaction with the perceived limitations of quantitative risk assessment and have proposed alternative qualitative and judgmental approaches ranging from "attributable fraction" estimates to risk management recommendations based on the precautionary principle or on expert judgments about the importance of classes of compounds in human medicine. This article presents a more traditional quantitative risk assessment of the likely human health impacts of continuing versus withdrawing use of fluoroquinolones and macrolides in production of broiler chickens in the United States. An analytic framework is developed and applied to available data. It indicates that withdrawing animal antibiotics can cause far more human illness-days than it would prevent: the estimated human BENEFIT:RISK health ratio for human health impacts of continued animal antibiotic use exceeds 1,000:1 in many cases. This conclusion is driven by a hypothesized causal sequence in which withdrawing animal antibiotic use increases illnesses rates in animals, microbial loads in servings from the affected animals, and hence human health risks. This potentially important aspect of human health risk assessment for animal antibiotics has not previously been quantified.     

Marginal Means/Rates Models for Multiple Type Recurrent Event Data

Recurrent events are frequently observed in biomedical studies, and often more than one type of event is of interest. Follow-up time may be censored due to loss to follow-up or administrative censoring. We propose a class of semi-parametric marginal means/rates models, with a general relative risk form, for assessing the effect of covariates on the censored event processes of interest. We formulate estimating equations for the model parameters, and examine asymptotic properties of the parameter estimators. Finite sample properties of the regression coefficients are examined through simulations. The proposed methods are applied to a retrospective cohort study of risk factors for preschool asthma.