Does the Stock Market Gender Stereotype Corporate Boards? Evidence from the Market's Reaction to Directors' Trades

Attitudes towards male and female managers within organizations are well documented, but how the stock market perceives their relative capabilities is less studied. Recent evidence documents a negative short‐run market reaction to the appointment of female chief executive officers and suggests that female executives are less informed than their male counterparts about future corporate performance. These results appear to dispute the stock market value of having women on corporate boards. However, such short‐run market reactions may retain a ‘gender bias’, reflecting the prevalence of negative stereotypes, where the market reacts to ‘beliefs’ rather than ‘performance’. This study tests for such bias by examining the stock market reaction to directors' trades in their own companies' shares, by measuring both the short‐run and longer‐term returns after the directors' trades. Allowing for firm and trade effects, some evidence is found that, in the longer term, markets recognize that female executives' trades are informative about future corporate performance, although initially markets underestimate these effects. This has important implications for research that has attempted to assess the value of board diversity by examining only short‐run stock market responses.     

Governance and Organizational Eclecticism in the Public Arena: Introductory Perspectives

The Symposium is introduced here in terms of its antecedents and the eclecticism of governance and organizations in the public arena. The all-embracing nature of governance is complemented by organizational diversity and hybridity in constellational formations and networks. Key capacities, recognizing the significance of organizational ownership, regulation and performance, are essential in creating structures, developing policies, taking action and fostering legitimacy in governance. An overview of these matters sets the scene for the analyses in subsequent articles.     

Correction to: Planning for active management of future invasive pests affecting urban forests: the ecological and economic effects of varying Dutch elm disease management practices for street trees in Milwaukee,WI USA

Urban Ecosystems - In Table 4, the column headings that explain the table data was not included in the published version     

Standards, Competence and Knowledge: Initial Teacher Training and Business

Initial teacher training in England and Wales has undergone a number of reforms which have imposed greater central control on institutions and individual programs. The culmination of this process has been the introduction of a competence based model. In this paper the authors explore the factors which have led to the adoption of a competence based approach in many sectors of education and training. They describe how a Post Graduate Certificate in Education program has been developed to enable students to achieve competence through the establishment of links between education and business. They go onto consider the wider implications of this approach for teaching and learning. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Role of Distrust in Offshore Safety Performance

Trust is recognized as a potentially important factor in safety within high-risk industries. However, little detailed empirical research has explored how trust operates in these contexts to influence worker safety performance. The present study addresses this by (i) identifying the target (occupational group) in which trust is most important for good safety, and (ii) establishing the "type" of trust (trust or distrust) with the greatest impact on safety performance. A questionnaire survey of 203 UK offshore gas workers' attitudes of trust and distrust toward four occupational groups (workmates, supervisors, offshore managers, and contractors) and an operating company was conducted. Logistic regression analysis identified attitudes toward offshore management as the strongest predictor of safety performance at an industry level. At an installation level, safety performance was best predicted by attitudes toward contractors and workmates. Further analysis revealed attitudes of distrust as better predictors of safety performance compared to attitudes of trust. These findings suggest that safety professionals should pay more attention to the role of distrust in safety performance. They also suggest that safety initiatives should target attitudes toward specific groups for optimal effectiveness.     

Optimal design of clinical trials comparing several treatments with a control

Clinical trials are often designed to compare several treatments with a common control arm in pairwise fashion. In this paper we study optimal designs for such studies, based on minimizing the total number of patients required to achieve a given level of power. A common approach when designing studies to compare several treatments with a control is to achieve the desired power for each individual pairwise treatment comparison. However, it is often more appropriate to characterize power in terms of the family of null hypotheses being tested, and to control the probability of rejecting all, or alternatively any, of these individual hypotheses. While all approaches lead to unbalanced designs with more patients allocated to the control arm, it is found that the optimal design and required number of patients can vary substantially depending on the chosen characterization of power. The methods make allowance for both continuous and binary outcomes and are illustrated with reference to two clinical trials, one involving multiple doses compared to placebo and the other involving combination therapy compared to mono-therapies. In one example a 55% reduction in sample size is achieved through an optimal design combined with the appropriate characterization of power.     

Supervising Professional Work under New Public Management: Evidence from an ‘Invisible Trade’

This paper assesses the extent to which the new public management (NPM) project has succeeded in replacing the custodial mode of professional work supervision with a more bureaucratic approach. The paper conceptualizes the key components of each mode within two ideal types of professional work supervision. It then draws on findings from a study of local‐authority social service departments to consider current arrangements against these ideal type configurations. The findings demonstrate that elements of the bureaucratic mode have emerged unevenly. So far, they have not displaced the emphasis that the supervisors of professional work place on protecting autonomy and limiting management control systems. This suggests that custodial approaches to the supervision of professional work may be more resilient than has been assumed within previous analyses of NPM.