Tosi and Gomez-Mejia, (1989) suggest that the challenge of corporate governance is to set up supervisory and incentive alignment mechanisms that alter the risk and effort orientation of agents to align them with the interests of principals. Therefore, the objective of this study is to determine the efficiency of monitoring and incentive contracts given certain characteristics of the firm. That ...

System simulation is an increasingly popular technique for analyzing and improving existing as well as newly designed underground mining operations. An engineering firm that specializes in simulation helped a major metals producer build a long-range planning model of an existing underground mine. Subsequently the team adapted this model to assess technology alternatives in the design of a new m...

These lectures are intended as a broad introduction to Chern Simons gravity and supergravity. The motivation for these theories lies in the desire to have a gauge invariant action –in the sense of fiber bundles– in more than three dimensions, which could provide a firm ground for constructing a quantum theory of the gravitational field. The case of ChernSimons gravity and its supersymmetric ext...

This paper reports on construction of a scale to measure a firm’s stance towards creative consumers – those adapting, modifying or transforming a proprietary offering. The instrument assesses an organization’s awareness of its creative customers, its attitude towards its creative customers, and finally the action taken in response. Tests of reliability and validity resulted in three clearly def...

Economists have long suspected that firm-to-firm relationships might increase price rigidity due to the use of explicit or implicit fixed-price contracts. Using confidential, transaction-level import data from the U.S. Census, I study the pass-through of exchange rate changes and show that prices are in fact substantially more responsive to cost shocks in older versus newly formed relationships...

Despite competing in highly turbulent and competitive industry, evidence suggests that construction firms have not put sufficient emphasis on strategic planning. Further, the practice of strategic planning in construction is dominated by informal and sporadic approaches/ processes, which rely heavily on the subjective judgement of top management and tacit knowledge of individuals involved. Lite...

Recent studies show that the likelihood of survival differs significantly across firms. Both firm and industry characteristics are hypothesized to account for this heterogenity. Using a longitudinal database of manufacturing firms we investigate whether firm or industry characteristics dominate. Our evidence suggests that both firmand industryspecific characteristics shape new-firm survival dur...

In recent years, the frequent financial fraud and audit failures in capital market show that work China has not been as expected by public, which only brings serious consequences to social economic development, but also reduces public's trust CPA industry. The quality directly affects professional service effect of certified public accountants, is foundation their survival. view comprehensivene...

Despite government-led good practice initiatives aimed to improve competitiveness in the U.K. construction sector, fluctuations in growth-driven demand, investment and constant regulatory revisions make it very difficult for an enterprise to plan strategically and remain competitive over a timescale exceeding 2 to 3 years. Research has been carried out to understand the historical evolution and...

Many models have been developed to assist contractors and clients in their cash flow forecasting. The majority of these have been based on standard cash flow S-curves, developed using the traditional manual approach, mathematical and statistical models. Many of these models failed to consider and analyse the factors responsible for the considerable variations in the modelled cash flow profiles....