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The aim of this paper is to examine how managerial ability affects corporate tax aggressiveness.

The study follows the work of Demerjian, Lev, and McVay (2012) and quantifies managerial ability by calculating how efficiently managers generate revenues from given economic resources using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The study uses a wide range of measures of tax aggressiveness. Firm fixed-effects regressions and a difference-in-differences approach using information regarding CEO turnover to control for endogeneity are used.

The study finds a negative relationship between managerial ability and corporate tax aggressiveness. Further tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced for firms with higher investment opportunities or firms with more reputational concerns.

Given the significant costs associated with tax aggressiveness and the negative effect it can have on managerial reputation if discovered, the results suggest that more able managers invest less effort in aggressive tax avoidance activities. This study furthers the understanding of how managerial personal traits affect corporate decision-making.

This study aims to explore the effects of intellectual capital (IC) on the occurrence of a modified audit opinion decision. The authors expect that high IC intensive firms are positively associated with the occurrence of a modified audit opinion since they are associated with an increased business risk and are more likely to exhibit issues concerning their financial health and stability.

Using a data sample of 423 listed firms from Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal over a 10-year period, the authors estimated a logistic regression model to examine the effects of IC on the probability that a modified audit opinion is issued. The authors used organizational capital as a measure of a firm’s intensity on IC.

Empirical findings indicate a significant and positive relationship between the IC and the likelihood of a firm receiving a modified audit opinion decision.

This study expands prior literature by exploring the predictive ability of IC on the likelihood of a firm receiving a modified audit opinion decision.

This paper aims to examine how bank stress tests affect bank tax planning.

The study uses US bank stress test bank size thresholds and a regression discontinuity design to investigate the effect of the Dodd-Frank Act and the instituted bank stress tests on bank tax planning. We use different measures of tax planning, including bank-specific measures and measures of tax avoidance, tax aggressiveness, and effective tax planning from recent literature. Our regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences regression analyses include bank and year fixed-effects and lagged bank characteristics to control for potential endogeneity.

This study finds that stress tests have the unintended consequences of intensifying tax planning and increasing tax avoidance. Stress-test banks increase tax avoidance by accelerating charge-offs, net interest, and non-interest expenses. However, this increase in tax planning is not optimally maximized, leading to lower effective tax planning compared to non-stress-test banks. Banks with a substantial increase in tax avoidance under the Dodd–Frank Act tend to increase their risk, investing in high-risk-weight assets and lending in riskier loan categories. These findings are consistent with tax minimization conditions under added regulatory attention and policy uncertainty.

Literature on bank tax planning is limited. Most tax avoidance literature excludes financial institutions such as bank holding companies mainly due to differences in business practices and regulatory frameworks. This study is the first to investigate tax planning behavior among US banks. The current study thus extends the research field by examining the effect of bank transparency regulations, such as bank stress tests, on bank tax planning activities. Our findings have a direct bank policy implication. They show that stress testing has the unintended consequences of increasing tax planning activities and consequently increasing risk-taking on banks with high tax avoidance, which goes against the goals of stress testing regulations.

This article aims to examine the influence of chief executive officer (CEO) internal political beliefs on labor relations. Prior research has paid little attention to channels through which the internal personal value system of managers enhances or deteriorates firm value. The authors provide evidence consistent with CEOs adopting labor policies impacting incumbent management–labor relationships based upon their political ideologies.

The research design tests the impact of CEO political ideology on labor relation using an individual CEO’s personal information and firm affiliation, employee lawsuit information, financial contributions to candidates and committees, and firm financial information. The authors compiled a sample of 4,354 unique CEOs from 2,558 US firms that are covered by ExecuComp and used 18,404 firm-year observations for the study’s analysis. A Heckman two-stage estimation process is used to address a potential sample selection bias and match the requirements of exclusion and relevance criteria.

Findings indicate that firms led by Republican-leaning CEOs are more likely to be sued by their employees, especially for violating union rights. Moreover, the findings of the study uncovered that Republican-leaning CEOs have fewer cases dismissed or withdrawn compared to Democrat-leaning CEOs and are also less likely to settle court cases prior to trial. Results indicate that Republican-leaning CEOs are associated with more substantial decreases in firm value compared to Democrat-leaning CEOs when facing labor allegations. The authors further show that firm value is lower for all firms facing litigation, with the magnitude of the decrease being more pronounced for firms with Republican CEOs.

Firm affiliations are identified using ExecuComp, employee lawsuit information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), financial contributions to candidates and committees from the Federal Election Committee (FEC) website, and financial information from Compustat. To the extent that these websites are inaccurate, such as financial contributions being underreported, the findings reported here may understate the relationships reported in this article.

The authors capture CEO political ideology using political contributions. There may be other means, such as physical space and personal effort, by which one could also estimate the party and intensity of CEO political ideology. This information is unavailable.

While presidential politics has four-year cycles, managerial finance is a daily activity. While political affiliation is most clearly measurable through monetary contributions, one can see implications of manager political leaning through their relationship with labor throughout the election cycle.

The analyses of this study indicate that labor unions are more likely to sponsor lawsuits and stronger allegations in firms with Republican CEOs and show that withdrawal, settlement or dismissal rates are lower when firms are managed by Republican managers, resulting in higher subsequent legal costs and potentially damaged employee morale. Also, this paper investigates whether lawsuits have a greater negative consequence on firm value when the firm is run by a Republican CEO. The authors find that lawsuits significantly lower Tobin's Q for Republican-led firms compared to companies with Democratic and apolitical CEOs. The authors further show that firm value is lower for all firms facing litigation, with the magnitude of the decrease being more pronounced for firms with Republican CEOs.

At the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, the Club of Rome in collaboration with a network of global contributors issued a statement calling for nations to declare a planetary emergency. The statement calls for urgent action to prevent a global crisis due to the impact of human activity on the stability of the Earth’s life-support systems. Implications of the planetary emergency pose intriguing challenges for how managers address paradoxical sustainability challenges across spatial and temporal scales. In this chapter, the authors have two aims. First, the authors show that the planetary emergency is inherently paradoxical. To do this, the authors build an embedded view of the planetary emergency and argue that it is paradoxical due to key dynamics that emerge across organizational, economic, social, and environmental systems over time. Second, the authors advance paradox theory by exploring the paradoxical nature of the planetary emergency and propose a three-sequence framework for collective action including: (1) building a view of the planetary emergency across spatial and temporal scales, (2) collectively making sense of the planetary emergency, and (3) levering a paradoxical view of the planetary emergency to ensure effective action.

This study aims to develop an automatic lane-change mechanism on highways for self-driving articulated trucks to improve traffic safety.

The authors proposed a novel safety lane-change path planning and tracking control method for articulated vehicles. A double-Gaussian distribution was introduced to deduce the lane-change trajectories of tractor and trailer coupling characteristics of intelligent vehicles and roads. With different steering and braking maneuvers, minimum safe distances were modeled and calculated. Considering safety and ergonomics, the authors invested multilevel self-driving modes that serve as the basis of decision-making for vehicle lane-change. Furthermore, a combined controller was designed by feedback linearization and single-point preview optimization to ensure the path tracking and robust stability. Specialized hardware in the loop simulation platform was built to verify the effectiveness of the designed method.

The numerical simulation results demonstrated the path-planning model feasibility and controller-combined decision mechanism effectiveness to self-driving trucks. The proposed trajectory model could provide safety lane-change path planning, and the designed controller could ensure good tracking and robust stability for the closed-loop nonlinear system.

This is a fundamental research of intelligent local path planning and automatic control for articulated vehicles. There are two main contributions: the first is a more quantifiable trajectory model for self-driving articulated vehicles, which provides the opportunity to adapt vehicle and scene changes. The second involves designing a feedback linearization controller, combined with a multi-objective decision-making mode, to improve the comprehensive performance of intelligent vehicles. This study provides a valuable reference to develop advanced driving assistant system and intelligent control systems for self-driving articulated vehicles.

University students' ratings of teaching and teachers' performance are used in many parts of the world for the evaluation of faculty members at colleges and universities. Even though these ratings receive mixed reviews, there is little conclusive evidence on the role of the intervening variable of teacher and student gender in these ratings. Possible influences resulting from gender-related differences in different socio-cultural contexts, especially where gender combination in student and faculty population is not proportionate, have not been adequately investigated in previous research. This study aimed to examine Iranian university students' ratings of the professional performance of male and female university teachers and to explore the differences in male and female university students' evaluation of teachers of the same or opposite gender. The study was a questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey with a total of 800 randomly selected students in their different years of undergraduate study (307 male and 493 female students, reflecting the proportion of male and female students in the university) from different faculties at the University of Kashan, Iran. The participants rated male and female teachers’ performance in observing university regulations, relationship with colleagues, and relationships with students. The researchers used descriptive statistics, means comparison inferential statistics and focus-group interview data to analyze and compare the students’ ratings. The results of one-sample t-test, independent samples t-test, and Chi-square analyses showed that a) overall, male university teachers received significantly higher overall ratings in all areas than female teachers; b) male students rated male teachers significantly higher than female students did; and c) female students assigned a higher overall mean rating to male teachers than to female teachers but this mean difference was not significant. These results are studied in relation to the findings in the related literature and indicate that gender can be an important intervening variable in university students' evaluation of faculty members.

The author presents the meat of the most common species consumed in Europe and their role in nutrition. The work focuses on the meat of mammals and birds; it does not deal with the importance of protein sources from other taxonomic categories. European meat consumption habits and consumer preferences are presented, taking into account religious, cultural and geographical differences. It examines the possibility of influencing and changing consumer behavior based on consumer opinions. It separately examines the reasons for the less preference of meat or the complete rejection of meat consumption among consumers. This chapter also points out the demographic effects, lifestyle changes and the economic effects of income conditions. It presents examples of the role of government propaganda and the marketing activities of producers or processors in encouraging consumption.