The Impact of Investor Horizon on Say‐on‐Pay Voting

Shareholder investment horizons have a significant impact on say‐on‐pay voting patterns. Short‐term investors are more likely to avoid expressing opinion on executive pay proposals by casting an abstaining vote. They vote against board proposals on pay only in cases where the CEO already receives excessive pay levels. In contrast, long‐term investors typically cast favourable votes. According to our findings, this is due to effective monitoring rather than collusion with the management. Overall, investor heterogeneity in terms of investment horizons helps explain say‐on‐pay voting, in particular the low levels of say‐on‐pay dissent, which have recently raised questions over the efficiency of this corporate governance mechanism .     

Simultaneous production and logistics operations planning in semicontinuous food industries

The production and logistics operations planning in real-life single- or multi-site semicontinuous food industries is addressed in this work. A discrete/continuous-time mixed integer programming model, based on the definition of families of products, is developed for the problem in question. A remarkable feature of the proposed approach is that in the production planning problem timing and sequencing decisions are taken for product families rather than for products. However, material balances are realized for every specific product, thus permitting the detailed optimization of production, inventory, and transportation costs. Changeovers are also explicitly taken into account and optimized. Moreover, alternative transportation modes are considered for the delivery of final products from production sites to distribution centers. The efficiency and the applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by solving to optimality two industrial-size case studies, for an emerging real-life Greek dairy industry.     

Estimation of small area event rates and of the associated standard errors

We develop empirical best estimators for small area event rates based on the hierarchical Poisson model with log-normal mixing distribution, when the basic data consists of area level measurements. We derive an approximate expression to the mean squared error of the estimators and we provide a method for estimating this expression.     

Crowding density in urban environment and its effects on emotional responding of pedestrians: Using wearable device technology with sensors capturing proximity and psychophysiological emotion responses while walking in the street

ABSTRACT

We conducted a study to examine the influence of crowding in high-density urban areas on the emotional responses of people. We hypothesized that high density leads to the invasion of a personal space that is surrounding everyone’s body which in turn evokes emotional responses, especially negative emotions like stress and aggression. Subjects (n = 30) walked a predefined, crowded path in a Hong Kong commercial center which consisted of urban parts and a park. Along the way, emotional responses were measured psychophysiologically via a wearable device, capturing electrodermal activity, skin temperature, and ambient temperature, among others. Additionally, we used a movement detection sensor to measure the invasion of personal space by other pedestrians. Significant effects of personal space crossings on aversive and appetitive emotional responses are found. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Alphabet Economics: The link between names and reputation

In economics, most coauthored papers have all coauthors in alphabetical order. It is sometimes argued that this conveys advantages to people whose names start with letters that come early in the alphabet. This paper examines whether the alphabetical ranking of names affects someone's reputation. Overall, we find that faculty members with earlier last name initials are more likely to get employment at high standard research departments. Furthermore, we show that the relationship between alphabetical placement and academic success remains significant if we use as an alternative measure of reputation the number of people showing an interest in the papers of a particular academic. This paper also investigates whether the reported alphabetical effect creates differential incentives for coauthoring. It is found that the reputational advantage of first-authorship motivates people to manipulate their names so as to obtain a more beneficial alphabetical position within the majority of articles.     

Simulating from polynomial-normal distributions

The family of polynomial-normal distributions includes a number of widely used distributions, such as the Gram–Charlier and Edgeworth distributions. In this note, we present three simple algorithms, (i) CDF Inversion, (ii) Acceptance–Rejection, (iii) and Ratio–of–Uniforms, for simulating variates from a polynomial-normal distribution. Details on the efficiency of the Acceptance–Rejection and the Ratio–of–Uniforms algorithms and a comparison across the various implementations are provided.     

Multivariate limited translation empirical Bayes estimators

The paper develops multivariate limited translation empirical Bayes estimators of the normal mean vector which serve as a compromise between the empirical Bayes and the maximum likelihood estimators. These compromise estimators perform better than the regular empirical Bayes estimators, in a frequentist sense, when there is wide departure of an individual observation from the grand average.     

Corporate Governance and Tobin's Q as a Measure of Organizational Performance

This empirical study examines the relationship between corporate governance and organizational performance (OP), measured using Tobin's Q (TQ) in the context of an emerging economy for which, as yet, only a handful of studies have been conducted. We employ a system generalized method of moments approach controlling for endogeneity and test it on a newly created dataset comprising 324 listed firms in Pakistan. We find that board size, number of board committees and ownership concentration are positively linked with high TQ ratio, whilst board independence and CEO duality display a negative relationship. In terms of moderating effects, we find that ownership concentration negatively moderates the relationship between board independence and OP, as well as that of CEO duality and OP. The relationship between the number of board committees and OP is positively moderated by ownership concentration. Our findings contribute towards a better articulation and application of a more concrete measure of OP ? that of the TQ ratio ? whilst, at the same time, testing the board composition–performance relationship in the context of an upcoming and increasingly important emerging market. Wider applicability of results and policy implications are discussed.