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The authors contend that immediately following the initial public offering (IPO), the new owners that replace the original ones are likely to request changes in two corporate governance mechanisms, board of directors and top management teams (TMTs). Following these alterations, the purpose of this paper is to propose that such changes will be detrimental for the performance of young entrepreneurial firms.

This study examines the post-IPO governance changes in young entrepreneurial firms. The sample consists of 185 companies that went public between 2001 and 2005. A hierarchical linear regression approach with the appropriate control variables is adopted to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that, following the changes in ownership structure post-IPO, changes are observed in one of the corporate governance mechanisms the authors considered, boards of directors, but not TMTs. Consistent with the general theme of this study, the authors also observed a negative impact of changes in boards of directors on subsequent firm performance; this was not the case with TMTs.

Contrary to the fundamental contentions of agency theory, the results highlight the need for adopting a different approach for young entrepreneurial firms.

The findings highlight the importance of preserving the entrepreneurial efficacy of young entrepreneurial firms.

This paper challenges the fundamental contentions of agency theory in the case of young entrepreneurial firms. The results demonstrate that post-IPO shareholders’ interference with the governance mechanisms results in lower performance.

This study examines compensation changes among top executives of formerly privately held stock insurers and mutual insurers at the time around an initial public offering. This study explains how CEO compensation changes following an IPO differ between these two types of insurers owing to their differing agency characteristics. The results also show that CEOs’ benefits increase materially following an IPO. The authors find evidence that reduced ownership retention by managers increases agency costs and CEOs of mutual insurers exploit their positions and increase their reward at the expense of policyholders.

As far back as 1947, Alfred Marshall proposed that the disparity in income between those individuals with moderate ability and those with greater ability is larger than the disparity in talent. Building on Marshall’s thesis, argues that marginal differences in firm capability may result not only in increased profitability, but also in lower susceptibility to macro‐economic risk factors for basic manufacturing firms in industrial markets. The results seem to suggest that the firms with greater ability have in fact managed to combine resources in such a way as to create inimitable advantages. Specifically, through a commitment to product and process innovation and modern manufacturing facilities, the most successful firms in the study have been able to acquire key resources, and gain extensive control over the value creation process. The outcome is high relative product quality, relative pricing power, and lower susceptibility to macro‐economic risk.

Over the past few years public interest in value for money from educational institutions has obliged administrative and teaching staff in such organisations to plan, organise and control more effectively, and in some cases to upgrade quality. Improved performance in an educational establishment, by the use of strategy formulation and implementation, is possible and is demonstrated by reference to Southeastern Louisiana University which has recently undergone such an experience.

States that owing to foresight and planning by Portuguese business executives, most firms in Portugal survived the difficult 1970s and 1980s and, as a consequence, are stronger in today’s competitive internal and external challenges. Sets out the methodology used and gives data analysis and results in a descriptive way, with the use of explanatory tables. Closes by stating that time‐based differentiation may offer new ways for firms competing in highly differentiated markets.

This paper's purpose is to show how literary texts can be used as a source for gaining insights into social practices, including accounting. It aims to deepen our understanding of such social practices in their cultural, social, economic and political contexts by examining portrayals of business and accounting transactions and of reflections of social and economic concerns in two German novels set during a time of economic and political crisis, namely the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation period.

The paper analyses, against the historical, social and economic backgrounds of the inflation period, the novels' authors' social and political perspectives as reflected in the novels; the literary devices employed; the way in which the description of business and accounting matters aids our understanding of everyday inflation period transactions and underlying economic and social concerns; and the links made between accounting/business, money and inflation on the one hand, and morality and rationality on the other hand.

The paper finds that in this exceptional economic situation, the relationship between accounting and morality as explored by Maltby is reversed. The portrayal of (often unusual and creative) economic transactions is used to illustrate the lack of economic, legal and moral certainty experienced by individuals and to evoke and critique the damage caused by the hyperinflation on German society and on human relationships, including the commoditisation of all aspects of life and the resulting moral decline.

The paper contributes to the literature exploring the role of representations of business/accounting and finance in narrative fiction. The novels examined here provide an alternative means for observing, interpreting and critiquing social phenomena, specifically in a setting where financial considerations dominate human interaction and social relationships.

Since the mid‐1990s, offshore production has become increasingly important in white‐collar, service sector activities in the US economy. This development coincided with a stagnant gender wage gap in the service sector and a slowdown in the narrowing of the overall US gender wage gap over this period. This paper aims to categorize white‐collar service sector occupations into two groups based on whether an occupation is at risk of being offshored and to assess the relative contribution of these two groupings, through their employment and wages, to the trends in the gender wage gap within the service sector and the US economy between 1995 and 2005.

Standard occupational decomposition methods are applied to Current Population Survey and Displaced Workers Survey data.

The findings show that in occupations at risk of being offshored, low‐wage women's employment declined, leading to an artificial increase in the average wage of the remaining women thereby narrowing the gender wage gap. This improvement in the gender wage gap was offset by the relative growth of high‐wage male employment in at‐risk occupations and the widening of the gender wage gap within not‐at‐risk occupations.

These findings contribute to the growing literature on the causes of the stagnation of the US gender wage gap in the 1990s.

Having a certain degree of assessment literacy is crucial for today's language teachers. The main aim of this paper is to provide that knowledge as it pertains to the writing skill. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the main practical issues that teachers often face when evaluating the written work of their students. It will consider issues and solutions in five major areas: test design; test administration; ways to assess writing; feedback to students; and the effects on pedagogy.

The author took a very practical and principled approach to the complete process of assessing the written work of our students in a foreign or second language.

The cyclical relationship between teaching and assessment can be made entirely positive provided that the assessment is based on sound principles and procedures. Both teaching and assessment should relate to the learners' goals and very frequently to institutional goals.

Good teachers spend a lot of time ensuring that their writing assessment practices are valid and reliable. The author deals with the fundamental issues that underlie good test design in a very practical and understandable way and later suggests practical steps to ensure smooth and reliable test administration before dealing with ways to assess a range of different writing tasks. Then, the crucial issue of how best to provide useful developmental feedback to students is considered. She concludes by discussing how best testing practice should seek to accommodate the requirements of test takers.

This topic is significant as assessing foreign/second language writing skills is one of the most problematic areas in language testing. It is made even more important because good writing ability is very much sought after by higher education institutions and employers.

In many cases, public management researchers’ focus lies in phenomena, embedded in a hierarchical context. Conducting surveys and analyzing subsequent data require a way to identify which responses belong to the same entity. This might be, for example, members of the same team or data from different organizational levels. It can be very difficult to collect such data in environments marked by high concerns for anonymity and data privacy. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a procedure for matching survey data without compromising respondents’ anonymity.

The paper explains the need for data collection procedures, which preserve anonymity and lays out a process for conducting survey research that allows for responses to be clustered, while preserving participants’ anonymity.

Survey research, preserving participants’ anonymity while allowing for responses to be clustered in teams, is possible if researchers cooperate with a custodian, trusted by the participants. The custodian assigns random identifiers to survey entities but does not get access to the data. This way neither the researchers nor custodians are able to identify respondents. This process is described in detail and illustrated with a factious research project.

Many public management research questions require responses to be clustered in dyads, teams, departments, or organizations. The described procedure makes such research possible in environments with privacy concerns; this is the case with many public administrations.

TITANIUM is a new metal but not a rare one. It is new in the sense that although its existence has been known since 1791, it is only within the last decade that it has become a product of metallurgical industry. It was not until 1925 that it was made by van Arkel, on a small experimental scale, in a state of sufficient purity for an assessment to be made of its properties and of its potential value as an engineering material. So far, it has not been possible to translate into a large scale and economically attractive extraction process the van Arkel technique and it was, in fact, left to W. J. Kroll to devise the first industrial process for the production of ductile titanium, which he described in 1940.