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The aim of this study is to examine the agency problems that arise between retail property owners and outsourced facility management (FM) service vendors in Ghana.

This study was carried out using telephone and face-to-face interviews. Nine facility managers (n =9) and six retail property owners (n = 6) purposively selected participated in the interviews. The responses from the interviews were analysed using content analysis. To begin with the analysis, the recorded audio for each respondent during the interviews was transcribed to augment what was written during the interviews. The next step was the development of a coding framework where each of the agency problems was assigned unique codes and grouped under themes. Each response was assigned a predefined code based on the agency problems identified in the literature. The research team discussed the consistency of the thematic codes assigned to each of the responses to ensure that each response was captured under the appropriate agency problem theme it best represents.

The results showed that agency problems in FM outsourcing in the Ghanaian retail sector are related to disagreement on expenditure associated with maintenance and repairs and improper tenant information sharing and use by FM service providers. Based on the findings, it is recommended that property owners explore the mixed approach to FM to mitigate the risks of complete outsourcing of FM services. It is also recommended that a clear path on how tenant information can be shared be pre-agreed in FM contracts.

This study provides new literature relating to agency problems in outsourcing and may be the first of its kind for FM in the Ghanaian retail industry. The findings could serve as a starting point for service providers and their principals to find common grounds to understand each other and mitigate the agency problems that could arise and their overall impact on performance.

This study aims to examine how the governance structure of the private pension system of Turkey affects the extent of agency problems through a qualitative exploratory analysis of the pension sector employees’ perspectives.

This study is based on qualitative exploratory research, which includes semi-structured interviews with 13 pension sector employees to investigate their perspectives on agency problems within Turkey’s private pension system. Data from interviews are analyzed by using the thematic content analysis method.

This study shows us that agency problems are prevalent in Turkey's private pension system, especially in the relations between pension company employees and participants. This study highlights four vulnerabilities of governance structure: the incapacity of governance structure to prevent pension companies as institutional agents from risky operations and transactions, the ability of local capital groups to use their controlling power for effecting fund management operations, the incapacity of the governance structure to prevent the employment of agents with inadequate qualifications, the lack of proper legal and regulatory framework for ensuring sufficient information disclosure to participants during contract-making and fund selection processes.

Previous research on the agency problems in the private pension schemes mostly investigated the issue from the viewpoint of participants. Thus, exploring agency problems from the agents’ point of view will be a contribution to the literature while illuminating the underlying structural problems within the system.

Based on agency perspective on temporary agency workers, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between firms’ agency problems and agency cost on agency workers; moreover, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are considered in seeking to understand how they moderate this relationship.

Using the Hsinchu Science Park directory of corporate affiliations as a sample frame, the authors adopted a paired questionnaire which included two parts in order to consider the possible problem of common method variances. The first part is completed by the manager of the firms and the second part is completed by his/her temporary agency workers. Finally, 94 firms completed questionnaires, providing a total sample of 94 R&D managers and 458 temporary agency workers. The rate of participation was 31.65 percent.

Using a questionnaire survey of 94 high-tech firms, from which a total of 94 R&D managers and 458 temporary agency workers participated, the results show that firms’ agency problems have a positive influence on the agency cost of monitoring temporary agency workers. In addition, while this relationship is negatively moderated by extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation has a non-significant moderating effect.

The managers of firms should consider not only the short-term flexibility of employing temporary agency workers, but also the long-term cultivation of promoting great agency workers. This could maximize the efficiency of the interaction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Of course, the firms should think about how to reduce the agency problems created by goal conflict, information asymmetry and risk sharing with temporary agency workers, because this could also provide a chance for the firms to decrease agency costs spent on monitoring.

Myopic going concern practice refers to the current audit going concern opinion that a firm is rewarded a favorable going concern opinion as long as it has the capability to satisfy its debt obligation in the following year. We show, via a structural agency problem we develop in the paper, that such a practice has a potential economic cost to the firm. We study Lucent Technologies Inc. in detail for its loss in economic value and also measure the magnitude of this impact with 500 companies. We find that Lucent should have lost its going concern status in 2002 as it had to sell off its assets to meet debt obligations and nearly 18% of the 500 firms suffer some degree of economic loss due to the agency problem.

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of digital participation in heritage collections as a democratizing practice by identifying and challenging silent assumptions concerning how the insufficient influence of participants is conceived of as a problem.

Three carefully selected scholarly texts incorporating problematizations of insufficient participatory agency were analyzed in detail using a method inspired by Carol Bacchi's approach “what's the problem represented to be?” (WPR), with special emphasis on analysis of ontological elements of the problematizations.

Participation is problematized based on the assumption that participatory agency risks jeopardizing the protection of heritage and leads to parts of the public memory being forgotten. To challenge the idea that participatory agency is destructive, the present article argues for elaborating an understanding of what forgetting entails for heritage. Framing forgetting as a potentially both harmful and generative concept enables a separation of destructive forgetting (e.g. destruction of historical evidence) and constructive forgetting (re-contextualization).

The study is based on a limited number of texts, and problematizations are investigated in relation to a specific perspective on participatory agency.

By understanding forgetting as a potentially beneficial activity for representation and heritage construction, the article provides a conceptual rationale for facilitating re-contextualization in the design of multi-layered information structures for heritage collections.

There is little earlier research on the silent assumptions that affect how participation is understood and implemented.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis of the long-term operating performance of family and non-family firms from the agency theoretic perspective. The analysis is focused on investigating the impact of family ownership on principal–agent conflicts of interest.

This paper examines the relationship between firm operating performance and family ownership for a large sample of 677 Australian-listed companies. The paper uses the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimator model developed by Arellano and Bond (1991) and used by other studies in finance (Baltagi, 2012; Bond, 2002; Mohamed et al., 2008).

The empirical results show that firms with ownership concentration has a better operating performance due to the alignment of owner-management interests. This study also finds that family-listed companies have higher survival rates and perform better than non-family companies. Findings support the hypothesis that agency costs arise as a result of privileged access of information and self-interest behaviour of managers (outsiders) in firms with dispersed ownership structures.

Earlier studies have only focused on short-term perspectives, particularly investigating small and medium types of Australian family businesses from narrow aspects, such as productivity, business behaviour, capital structure and leverage. Therefore, this paper has conducted a comparative examination of family and non-family firms listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) to identify the impact of agency costs on their financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and examine the role of accounting conservatism on firm investment behavior in China.

By combining a developed theoretical framework and empirical study, this paper examines the impacts of accounting conservatism on firm investment. The sample and data are all collected from Wind and CAMAR databases.

The paper finds that the association between accounting conservatism and capital expenditure is significantly positive when inside capital is not enough to use for investment, suggesting that conservatism can expend the level of investment by decreasing information asymmetry and cost of capital; however, the association between accounting conservatism and capital expenditure is significantly negative when inside capital is enough to use for investment, suggesting that conservatism can curtail the level of investment by mitigating the interest conflicts between management and outside shareholders and decreasing agency costs. Additionally, the paper finds that the severity of information asymmetry and agency problem affects the role of accounting conservatism on firm investment behaviour, and the association between accounting conservatism and capital expenditure is weaker for firms with ultimate ownership controller as local government or individuals.

This is the first paper to analyze and examine the impacts of accounting conservatism on firm investment in China directly. The findings are also useful to explain the awkward predicament found by prior literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction between competition and corporate payout policy and more specifically to answer the question that whether competition mitigates the principal–principal agency conflicts and influences firms to distribute dividends to shareholders in Chinese corporations.

This research models measures of competition with scaled measures of dividends and analyzes a sample of 16,730 firm-year observations from Chinese-listed manufacturing firms for the period spanning 2003 to 2016. Further, this research uses the Tobit model (a censored regression) to empirically test the proposed hypotheses.

This research finds that intense competition not only mitigates agency problems and forces firms to disgorge cash but also increases a firm’s likelihood to pay dividends and weakens the negative association between agency conflicts and dividends.

The results show an important policy implication for the industry. As the principal–principal agency conflict restrains the dividends, the regulatory authorities could encourage a competitive environment and a more diverse ownership structure to induce a higher dividend rate and protect the minority shareholders. In addition, this study also has implications for other emerging markets characterized by concentrated ownership and principal–principal agency problems.

This study adds to the literature related to the disciplinary role of competition and identifies competition as a significant determinant of corporate payout policy. Furthermore, this research extends earlier research on corporate payout decisions that besides firm-level corporate governance and country-level legal system, industry-level competition also influences corporate payout decisions, significantly.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how family ownership enhances or damages firm value.

The paper studies a sample of Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) between 1999 and 2007 and apply multivariate regression with firm value as a dependent variable. The paper measures firm value as Tobin ' s Q and ROA based either on net income or EBITDA. The independent variables include family firm dummy and ownership percentage.

It is found that control-enhancing mechanisms which are often employed by family companies add value to companies. Furthermore, it is found that agency conflicts between ownership and management are less costly than those between majority and minority shareholders, suggesting that family ownership helps resolve the agency conflicts between ownership and management and in turn enhances firm value. Finally, it is found that family companies with founders as CEOs outperform those with descendants as CEOs.

The paper studies Canadian family firms; as such, the sample size is not relatively large. Nonetheless, the results should be generalized as Canada is one of the largest markets in the world and have high integration with the rest of the world.

The results suggest investors should invest in family ownership firms.

The paper shows whether firm ownership increases firm value and the determinant of family firm value.

Determining the optimal capital structure becomes more complicated by the presence of an agency problem. The issuance of debt as a corporate governance mechanism introduces the asset substitution problem – the agency cost of debt. Thus, there is a recognized need for models that can resolve the agency problem between the debtholder and the manager who acts on behalf of the shareholder, leading to optimal capital structure choice, and enhanced firm value. The purpose of this paper is to model the debtholder-manager agency problem as a dynamic game, resolve the conflicts of interests and determine the optimal capital structure.

As there is no satisfactory model for dealing with the above issues, this paper uses a differential game framework to analyze the incongruity of interests between the debtholder and the manager as a non-cooperative dynamic game and further resolves the conflicts of interests as a cooperative game via a Pareto-efficient outcome.

The optimal capital structure required to minimize the marginal cost of the agency problem is a higher use of debt, lower cost of equity and withheld capital distributions. The debtholder is also able to enforce cooperation from the manager by providing a lower and stable cost of debt and a greater debt facility in the overtime framework.

The study develops a new dynamic contract theory model based on the integrated issues of capital structure, corporate governance and agency problems and applies the differential game approach to minimize the agency problem between the debtholder and the manager.