Suchergebnisse

The first historical study of morality and science in Canadian medicine, Medicine and Morality shows how moments of doubt in doctors' impartiality resulted in changes to how medicine was done, and even to the very definition of medical practice itself.

The first historical study of morality and science in Canadian medicine, Medicine and Morality shows how moments of doubt in doctors' impartiality resulted in changes to how medicine was done, and even to the very definition of medical practice itself

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the content of voluntary disclosures of intangible asset (IA) information communicated by the world's leading 200 emerging-market companies. We make a detailed assessment of the variety, nature, and extent of IA disclosures in annual reports using an index based on the Value Chain Scoreboard™ devised by Lev (2001). Our findings show that the vast majority of companies engage in IA voluntary disclosure practices. As expected, most companies disclose IA information stemming from the Discovery and Learning phase of the value chain, while significantly fewer companies disclose IA information from the Implementation phase. Contrary to popular belief, we find that the majority of companies disclose quantitative IA information, with both financial and nonfinancial components, rather than qualitative. Our results further indicate that the variety, nature, and extent of IA voluntary disclosures differ according to type of accounting standard adopted and industry, but not size or foreign listing.

The board of directors is one of a number of internal governance mechanisms that are intended to ensure that the interests of shareholders and managers are closely aligned, and to discipline or remove ineffective management teams. Among the most significant governance issues currently faced by the modern corporation are those relating to diversity, such as gender and age, and independence of directors.While board diversity and independence has been a growing area of research in recent years, most empirical research on this topic has been restricted to US data. The generalisability of such findings may not extend across national boundaries due to different regulatory and economic environments, cultural differences, the size of capital markets and the effectiveness of governance mechanisms. Consequently, the importance and value of various governance structures, including board diversity and independence, should be separately examined in each country, and the influential factors investigated.This study reports on the diversity and independence of the board membership of 100 top Australian companies in 2003. Australia has one of the most developed stock markets in the Asia‐Pacific region. With the collapse of several well‐known public companies such as Ansett, OneTel and HIH, there is an increasing demand to evaluate the corporate governance practices of Australian companies, including the composition of boards. Accordingly, this research provides a timely review of the state of corporate governance in Australia so far as board composition is concerned.

ABSTRACT
This paper examines the influence of national culture on corporate governance. We postulate that national culture can shape the contracting environments by serving as an informal constraint that affects incentives and choices in corporate governance. We hypothesize that national culture can explain cross-country variations in corporate governance after controlling for legal, political, financial, and economic institutions. We develop a Rule Preference Index as a proxy of national culture for a sample of 12,909 firm-year observations from 41 countries. Employing a hierarchical linear modeling approach to isolate the effects of firm-level and country-level variables, we find robust evidence that firms (and countries) with a higher Rule Preference Index tend to have better corporate governance.