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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the price and volatility transmission between natural gas, fertilizer (ammonia), and corn markets, an issue that has been traditionally ignored in the literature despite its significant importance.

The authors jointly estimate a vector error correction model for the conditional mean equation and a multivariate generalized autoregressive heteroskedasticity model for the conditional volatility equation to investigate the interactions between natural gas, ammonia, and corn prices and their volatility.

The authors find significant interplay between fertilizer and corn markets, while only a mild linkage in prices and volatility exist between those markets and natural gas during the period 1994-2014. There is not only a positive relationship between corn and ammonia prices in the short run, but both prices react to deviations from the long-run parity. Furthermore, the lagged conditional volatility of ammonia prices positively affects conditional volatility in the corn market and vice versa. This result is robust to a specification using crude oil price as an alternative to natural gas price to account for the large transportation cost built into ammonia prices. Results for the period of 2006-2014 indicate virtually no linkage between natural gas prices and those of fertilizer and corn during that period, while linkages in price level and volatility between the latter remain strong.

This paper is the first in the literature to comprehensively examine the role of fertilizer on corn prices and volatility, and its relation to natural gas prices.

The role of dark side personality characteristics in the workplace has received increasing attention in the organizational sciences and from leadership researchers in particular. We provide a review of this area, mapping out the key frameworks for assessing the dark side. We pay particular attention to the roles that the dark side plays in leadership processes and career dynamics, with special attention given to destructive leadership. Further, we examine the role that stress plays in the emergence of leaders and how the dark side plays into that process. We additionally provide discussion of the possible roles that leaders can play in producing stress experiences for their followers. We finally illustrate a dynamic model of the interplay of dark leadership, social relationships, and stress in managerial derailment. Throughout, we emphasize a functionalist account of these personality characteristics, placing particular focus on the motives and emotional capabilities of the individuals under discussion.

Most research issues in strategic management are essentially problem focused. To one extent or another, these problems often span levels of analysis, may align with different performance metrics, and likely hold different implications from various theoretical perspectives. Despite these variations, research has generally approached questions by taking a single perspective or by contrasting one perspective with a single alternative rather than exploring integrative implications. As such, very few efforts have sought to consider the performance implications of using combined, integrated, or multi-level perspectives. Given this reality, what actually constitutes “good” performance, how performance is effectively measured, and how performance measures align with different perspectives remain thorny problems in strategic management research. This paper discusses potential extensions by which strategic management research and theory might begin to address these conflicts. We first consider the multi-level nature of strategic management phenomena, focusing in particular on competitive advantage and value creation as core concepts. We next present three approaches in which strategic management theories tend to link levels of analysis (transaction, management, and atmosphere). We then examine the implications arising from these multi-level approaches and conclude with suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of company performance, governance structure and ownership structure in determining the managerial remuneration for 134 listed companies in India over the years 2003-2012.

Remuneration paid to the board of directors of companies is taken to represent the managerial remuneration. Exogeneity among the company performance measures is verified with the endogtest suggested in Baum et al. (2007). A fixed effects panel regression with clustered standard errors is employed after checking for the presence of heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence in the data.

The study reveals that managerial remuneration increases as the accounting performance of companies improves, whereas the market performance of companies has no significant association with managerial remuneration. The study also shows that foreign institutional shareholding is significantly and positively related with managerial remuneration in India.

This study highlights the various factors which affect the determination of managerial remuneration in India. These findings can be used as inputs by regulatory authorities in framing and improving governance norms regarding managerial remuneration. This study also suggests that factors other than the number, the independence and objectivity of independent directors are more important in determining managerial remuneration.

The present study proposes more reliable results, obtained through a fixed effects panel regression model with clustered standard error estimates and also checks endogeneity of performance measures with the endogtest, which is the appropriate test to use for verifying endogeneity in panel data.

The Slender Man, an online monster born to the internet in 2009, loves to live in the boundaries, specifically the boundary between the digital and the non-digital worlds. This chapter seeks to explore the full engagement of the community with the myth, analysing it structurally to understand the way, in which the narrative’s construction reflects the relationship of monster to society and society to itself. The sincerity in which the narratives are told, at first appearing intense, is actually a form of play, revealing a boundary blurring between play and non-play as well. While fully engaging in play, the community’s structured narrative is more than this: pulling them into a trapped world in which they play with death in the digital. The triadic structure of the Slender Man narratives reveals an anxiety to the community and their place within broader non-digital worlds.

Considerable research efforts have been made to investigate the relative importance of firm‐specific vs industry structure factors in relation to performance variation among firms in the past. However, the vast majority of the research comes from the USA and very little is known about results outside of this domain. The aim of this study was to investigate industry and firm factors producing performance differences among Turkish firms. In order to explore the contributions of firm‐level factors and structural characteristics of industries, the study decomposes the relative impact of industry and firm effects on overall performance which includes the performance items such as sales turnover, market share and profitability.

A quantitative, positivistic approach was adopted with respect to the methodological choice for this study. In order to measure the relative impact of industry and firm effects on performance, the questionnaire developed by Galbreath and Galvin was sent to the e‐mail addresses of the general managers or the other executives at the top level as a web‐link with a covering letter. Because unit of analysis is at the firm level, a single informant is used in the study and the questionnaire was mailed to only one executive from each firm. Having collected the data, the effects of firm‐level factors (resources and capabilities) and industry structure on performance variation were analyzed by hierarchical regression method.

A total of 259 firms from different industries were analyzed and the findings revealed that firm‐level resources had a greater effect in explaining performance variation than industry structure in the Turkish business context. The results of this study confirm that in the resource‐based view of the firm, the firms in Turkey “demonstrated a quite developed form of organizational learning” just like the other emerging economies (i.e. Taiwan, Brazil, Poland and South Korea). Within this framework, Turkish firms especially in automotive, textile, food, tourism and construction industries became important players in the global arena.

This study contributes to the strategic management literature, particularly, in terms of providing comparable data from an emerging country, which is significant in verifying resource‐based theory and generalizing results in a global context. The findings also suggest that the firms need to focus on their unique resources rather than try to control and manipulate structural forces in their industries since “the economies today might best be viewed as resource‐based economies”. It should be noted that, in this business era, the key challenge for the managers is the optimal deployment of existing strategic resources in order to make their organizations achieve sustainable competitive advantage and superior firm performance.

Much prior work involving director incentives and corporate behaviour has been focussing on their absolute dollar value or the intrinsic value and generated mixed findings. Comparison theories, however, suggest that the relative value of an incentive may be the main drive for individual performance. This study attempts to investigate the role of director relative pay in promoting the board’s intervention with unrelated diversification decisions.

The analysis uses data from firms operating in more than one segment during the period from 1999 to 2019. Data were obtained from WRDS databases. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis and the two-stage system generalized method of moments (GMM) were run to test the hypotheses. To test the robustness of the findings, alternative proxies for the key independent variables were used in separate analyses.

The results support the hypothesis that unrelated diversification negatively impact firm performance, while higher director relative pay will help reduce unrelated business diversification. The absolute director pay, however, has no significant impact on corporate strategic choices. The results also highlight the moderating effect of director overcompensation. Director overcompensation will cancel out the impact of relative director pay on unrelated diversification.

This study takes a fresh theoretical perspective by framing the investigation using the dimensional comparison theory to address the single untended comparison framework in the director pay structure – the intra-individual framework. It is the first to investigate the role of director relative pay in corporate strategic choices. The findings support the contention that the relative value of the incentive is an important indicator of the effectiveness of the pay.

The existing literature involving director compensation has been concentrating on its absolute or intrinsic values. Although the relevant studies have generated mixed findings, research in other fields suggests that the power of an incentive may be determined by its value relative to the chosen referencing standard more than its absolute value. This study aims to investigate how relative director pay affects corporate investment efficiency.

This study takes a fresh theoretical viewpoint by framing the investigation using the dimensional comparison theory and proposing that a directorship also presents a relative value that may influence the board’s performance. Ordinary least squared regressions and two-stage system generalised method of moments are used to analyse 14,267 firm-year observations.

The empirical results suggest that the relative director pay is a better estimate of the power of the incentive than the absolute pay. A positive association between the relative director pay and investment efficiency is evident, while the absolute pay has no significant effect on investment decisions. Director overcompensation, however, will cancel out the positive effect of director compensation on investment efficiency. Firms with relatively lower unexpected investment (UI) level benefit the most from an increase in the relative director pay, while neither absolute nor relative director pay affects investment choices in firms with a high UI level because of significantly more overcompensation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to investigate the effect of relative director pay. It is also the first to examine the role of dimensional comparison in strategic decisions which is the single untended comparison framework in the director pay design. The current director pay structure has emphasised social and temporal equality by standardising the pay structure and vesting the equity-based pay over a long period. Yet it ignores the fact that people decide their commitment level by comparing the reward with an internal referent too. The findings speak to the dimensional comparison theory in that the inequality emanated from dimensional or internal comparison may be accentuated by the perceived equality in other comparison frameworks, driving the different performances in the roles one assumes.

Academic outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain poor, especially in the area of reading, in particular, reading comprehension. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate subcomponent skills of reading comprehension for children with ASD in order to better understand its development and potential interventions to enhance outcomes. This chapter highlights the current knowledge in the field in regards to the key cognitive and language skills associated with reading development for individuals with ASD. These include emergent-literacy skills, word-reading and decoding, reading fluency, oral language, and social cognition. Additionally, the chapter makes suggestions for future research in this area, in particular the need to conduct research to establish evidence-based practices to better support the syndrome-specific reading needs for this population.