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This study explored the feasibility of developing scaled inspection tools for use during external inspection of health and social care facilities to give improved accuracy in identifying facilities “at risk”, a tool for risk-adjusted frequency of inspection, and greater consistency of judgements.

This paper summarises the development through working groups and workshops involving 20 experienced inspectors (nurses and social workers) of the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority who inspect the 206 nursing and 182 residential care homes in Northern Ireland. A brief evaluation survey, including response to a case vignette, gathered inspectors' views after using the tools for six months.

Eight two-dimensional Scaled Inspection Tools were created, each embodying a scale of performance (seriousness of risk issue) and a scale of the ability of the facility to manage that issue, each axis comprising four points. The Scaled Inspection Tools were used for on-site inspections during 2017–18. Evaluative comments were generally positive. The case vignette seemed to highlight greater risk aversion amongst newer inspectors.

The creation of scaled inspection tools adds credibility to the potential for developing risk-based governance in service regulation. Further testing of domains and their scope is required.

Prompts for each domain were found essential to guide inspectors. Despite the challenge of change, inspectors became enthusiastic about use for evaluating risks, and managers about improvements in consistency of inspection.

Knowledge derived from statistical approaches needs to be incorporated into inspection and regulation, just as in other aspects of professional practice.

Scaled inspection tools, with two orthogonal axes corresponding to seriousness of risk and ability to manage the risk (inverse of likelihood of harm), proved acceptable and intuitive in use. The study gives credibility to the possibility of developing screening and surveillance approaches to risk-based governance in service regulation.

Diabetes is regarded as a global epidemic with 382 million people globally suffering from diabetes. It also has major implications on patients’ quality of life. There are also high cost of treatment associated with diabetes for both patient and healthcare provider. Telemonitoring represents an excellent technology opportunity to redefine health care delivery. Using technology for home-based care promises the ability to deliver more cost effective care whilst also enhancing quality of care and patient satisfaction. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The current research aims to contribute to the methodological design of action research projects in their use to implementation health technologies such as telemonitoring. In particular, it seeks create a model which can be used to demonstrate the efficacy of the use of the action research method as a viable alternative to the traditional randomised control trials methodology currently employed in healthcare.

The paper contributes towards the methodological design to investigate the area of practice making use of the telemonitoring programme within a Victorian Health Services Network using action research.

It intends to address the research problem of the low utilisation of telemonitoring within Monash Health as a whole, and more specifically within the diabetes unit. In this context the research intends to utilise the benefits of telemonitoring to improve clinical outcomes of patients by increasing insulin stabilisation. It is also intended the research organisation benefits by increased efficiency by decreasing clinical workforce time spent on managing patient insulin data.

The purpose of this paper is to explore four types of equality and diversity actors at both the national and the local level and the extent to which such actors may be seen as either alternative sources of loyalty and as replacements in competition with trade unions or as complementary to existing union structures.

The research method is multi‐level and based on national level policy analysis and on two local NHS trust case studies. It relies on 30 interviews with policy advisers and key actors (i.e. officials of trade unions, Black networks, identity groups and community groups) and 66 case study interviews; in sum, a total of 96 participants were involved in the study. The paper also involves documentary analysis of Department of Health strategies on equalities and diversity, BMA reports and advisory documents, and policy and advisory documents of the two hospitals.

Findings indicate that the interrelationship between networks reflects both the complementarity and replacement theses, but recognises different networks may also operate in different spheres leading to little or no interrelationship.

This exploratory framework has drawn attention to the importance of equality actors in the field of industrial relations and employment. It is recognised that these findings are situated in a particular geographical and historical moment and that different replacement/complimentarity forms may emerge in different national, sectorial and historical context.

Reflecting insights from mobilisation theory, the paper identifies the importance of leaders and issues of injustice as important components of the formation and development of equality and diversity networks at different levels but demonstrates the complexity of the attribution concept.

This paper's originality lies in its exploratory framework of the interelationship between different equality actors and the replacement/complementarity debate in industrial relations.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamics between executive ownership and excess cash policy in the UK.

The authors identify firms adopting an excess policy using a joint criterion of high cash and cash higher than the target. Logit analysis is used to estimate the impact of executive ownership and other governance characteristics on the probability of adopting an excess cash policy.

The results suggest that, in the UK, the impact of the executive ownership on the probability of adopting an excess cash policy is non-monotonic, in line with the alignment-entrenchment hypothesis. The results are robust to different definitions of excess cash policy, to alternative specifications of the regression model, to different estimation frameworks and to alternative proxies of ownership concentration.

The authors’ approach provides a new measure of the excess target cash for the firm. They show the need to identify an excess target cash policy not only by using an empirical criterion and a theoretical target level of cash, but also by capturing persistence in deviation from the target cash level. The authors’ measure of excess target cash calls into questions findings from previous studies. The authors’ approach can be used to explore whether excess cash holdings of UK firms and the impact of managerial ownership have changed from before the crisis to after the crisis.

The authors’ measure of excess target cash allows identifying in practice levels of cash which are abnormal with respect to an equilibrium level. UK firms should be cautious in using executive ownership as a corporate governance mechanism, as this may generate suboptimal cash holdings and suboptimal firm value. Excess cash policy might be driven not only by a poor corporate governance system, but also by the interplay between agency costs of managerial opportunism and cost of the external finance which further research could explore.

Actually, “how much cash is too much” is a question that has not been addressed by the literature. The authors address this question. Also, this amount of cash allows the authors to study the extent to which executive ownership contributes to explain the out-of-equilibrium persistency in the cash level.

The purpose of this paper is to identify firms in the UK adopting a policy of high cash and low leverage and investigate how executive ownership contributes to this decision.

Firms following this policy are identified both by using a fixed classification approach and the analysis of the distribution of cash and leverage. Logit analysis is then used to estimate the probability of adopting the policy as a function of executive ownership.

Extreme financial policies are suboptimal as firms adopting these policies tend to undershoot (overshoot) their target leverage (cash holdings) ratios. The impact of the executive ownership on the probability of adopting this policy is U-shaped, in line with the alignment–entrenchment hypothesis.

Despite the substantial presence of non-executive directors in the boards and a significant amount of shareholdings by executive directors, the firms under analysis have adopted suboptimal financial policies possibly because poorly governed or because executive ownership is the range where entrenchment is feasible.

This is the first attempt at recognising policies of high cash and low leverage as being explicitly interdependent. It is also the first study focussing on the UK, a country of interest, because ownership structure is relatively dispersed. Moreover, instead of choosing fixed threshold levels of the variable in defining the extreme financial policy, this paper proposes the analysis of the distribution of cash holdings and leverage and accounts for target levels of cash and leverage.

In spite of an abundance of corporate governance literature across the world, the Botswana corporate sector is lacking. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among the ownership structure, board characteristics and financial performance to determine the role of corporate governance in the performance behavior of companies listed in such an emerging market in Africa as Botswana.

Ordinary least square (OLS) models are applied to Botswana Stock Exchange listed firms over the period 2000‐2007 to determine the role of corporate governance in the performance behavior of companies listed in an emerging market.

The empirical evidence shows distinct nature of corporate governance behavior among alternative performance measures used, in particular, between accounting‐based/hybrid and market‐based measures.

Such diversified findings provide the policy‐makers with insights to take appropriate measures on corporate governance and stock market development in order to ensure their efficiency.

The approach of this study is different from the other available literature as it captures all types of shareholdings together in addition to other corporate governance and firm‐specific predictable variables.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether dominant shareholder(s) of a firm enhance performance in Bangladesh and thus examines the arbitrary moves by the regulatory bodies, in the name of promoting “good corporate governance”, to restrict ownership concentration.

Building on the established literature, a simultaneous equations approach is applied to model the relationship between ownership concentration and performance and is tested on a sample of 567 observations on firms listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange over a seven‐year period. The two equations model consists of firm performance and ownership concentration as endogenous variables along with other governance variable.

The results suggest a significant positive co‐deterministic relationship between ownership concentration and firm performance indicating that ownership concentration and firm performance simultaneously impact each other. It suggests that the ownership restriction imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission is unjustified and detrimental to firm performance/growth in emerging countries such as Bangladesh.

This new evidence from an emerging market enhances our understanding of corporate governance in Asian countries. The study has implications for stakeholders, regulators and policy makers to revisit their attempt to limit founder‐family ownership holdings. Instead, their aim should be to balance the home‐grown unique features, such as a Top‐1 dominant shareholder, with Western governance mechanisms.

The paper is the first to consider Top 1 shareholder's ownership as the measure of ownership concentration, which is an important feature of the corporate sector in emerging markets. In emerging markets, founder‐family ownership concentration acts as an alternative governance mechanism substituting for strong and effective legal backing and other market‐driven monitoring mechanisms.

This study aims to analyze stock market reactions to layoff announcements in the renewable energy sector. The global renewable energy sector and most of the producers of wind and solar energy equipment are struggling. While changes in the regulation and in the promotion of energy production from renewable sources reduced the attractiveness of these technologies, many involved companies had to downsized their workforce to increase performance. The public often perceives these announcements as a way of increasing shareholder wealth at the cost of the employees. Support for this claim is often given in the form of isolated case study considerations. However, the case may be different for the renewable energy sector as changes in the overall institutional environment have sustainably deteriorated the prospects of this industry.

This study analyses stock market reactions of 65 layoff announcements made by companies in the renewable energy industry in the years from 2005 to 2014. The reactions are measured by cumulative abnormal returns, which are obtained by using the event study methodology.

It shows a significantly negative market reaction to the announcement of a layoff plan on the event day. The findings are generally in line with our expectations and underline the negative perspectives of the sector from a capital market point of view and the declining importance of the sector with respect to employment numbers.

The results of this study are important for investors when estimating the capital market reactions to layoff announcements and when they form their own expectations regarding possible future layoff announcements. For the public, the results are of interest as the prejudice, that layoff plans are used to increase shareholder wealth, can be dismantled. The opposite is shown.

Labor-related risks resulting from layoffs may pique auditors’ scrutiny. Although previous research has enriched the understanding of the economic consequences of layoffs, the authors know relatively little about the relationship between layoffs and audit fees. This study aims to investigate whether auditors are concerned about corporate layoff events and their pricing decisions under the influence of the events.

This study examines the effect of layoff storms on audit fees using news reports from mainstream financial and economic media in China about layoffs in listed companies. Based on whether the company is reported to have layoffs by the media in a fiscal year, this study collects data on 204 layoff storms in A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2022. Then, this study uses propensity score matching to reduce the interference of basic company characteristics.

This study finds that audit fees are higher after firms experience layoff storms. Higher internal control quality and pay advantage in the industry weaken the positive relationship between layoff storms and audit fees, while higher political uncertainty strengthens this positive relationship. Further tests show that companies with proactive layoffs, persistent layoffs and media disclosures of layoff numbers face more audit fees, but the type of corporate response to the layoff does not influence audit pricing.

This study contributes to the literature on audit pricing and the economic consequences of layoffs by emphasizing the impact of labor-related risks on audit fees.

How does downsizing affect long‐ and short‐term organizational performance? The present study aims to address this important question and attempts to extend previous research by examining the effect of both personnel and assets reduction on long‐ and short‐term firm performance.

The paper uses data collected through secondary sources on 196 firms traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) between 1992 and 2001.

Econometric analyses indicate the positive impact of a combination of downsizing strategies on short‐term performance, and the negative effect of this combination on long‐term performance and high‐tech industry performance is negatively related to assets and personnel cutbacks. Whereas downsizing affects the short‐term performance of larger and established companies positively, it generally affects long‐term performance inversely.

This study offers a first examination of the effects of simultaneous cutbacks in personnel and assets. This combined strategy goes further than dismissing employees, since layoffs are linked to the sale of such tangible assets as product lines or manufacturing facilities. By so doing, firms downscale their activities commensurate with the reduction in workforce and are less likely to generate excess workload on the remaining employees.