Thesis (M.Sc.Admin.)--Faculty of Commerce and Administration, Concordia University, 1998. / "December 1998" Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-157). Available also on the Internet.

M.Comm. (Financial Management) / Although general studies have been conducted on the agency problem, such studies have not focused on the relationship between executive remuneration and company performance. Many of the studies conducted abroad have focused on quantitative methods using regression analysis to understand the relationships between diverse financial performance measures and a variety of performance appraisal techniques. This study aims at establishing the relationship between executive remuneration and company financial performance on the basis of 20 of the largest companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange Ltd (JSE). It has been observed that JSE-listed South African companies have almost a standard governance framework for determining salary structures of CEOs and directors. Furthermore it can be seen that most performance-linked payouts for CEO's and directors are based on measurement criteria established which are based on actual performance levels achieved. For this reason, it may be concluded that short-term targets are crucial to keeping a business going, to ensure positive cash flows, manage working capital, and achieve year-on-year growth of revenues and profits. However, to ensure survival and sustainability of the business in the changing global and local environments, long-term strategies should be formulated and various steps should be taken by CEOs, supported by other executive and non-executive directors. This research focuses on short-term goals and their influence on executive remuneration for CEOs and CFOs. The performance measures selected for this study were revenues, profits, share price and net asset value. These performance measures selected are supported by the relevant academic literature. The results of this study reveal that CEOs and CFOs have received lower remuneration in the form of bonuses as a result of companies not achieving their short-term goals.

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Success in business is for the most part defined in financial terms and, because of this, business operations are almost entirely, if not entirely, directed to this end. The principle behind this rationale has been informed by the thought that the best contribution businesses can make to social justice is to focus on the bottom line. By appealing to enlightened self-interest and the high premium people place on freedom, neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek argue that maximising profits is necessarily socially responsible. And, moreover, that not to pursue this end is socially irresponsible. Social responsibility is the ultimate justification that thinkers such as Friedman and Hayek appeal to when claiming that the business of business is to maximise profit. Yet this position is internally inconsistent. The position is ultimately justified by what is socially just but this means that in fact social justice, and not profit-making, ought to be the end of business. I shall argue that taking this commitment seriously involves rejecting the idea that the aim of business is to maximise profits. This is not to say that businesses should not make profits, rather it implies that this feature is not what ultimately makes them successful. The central contribution of this project is to resolve the contradictions embedded in the traditional approach to business by arguing that the primary aim of business is the promotion of social justice. To this end success in business needs to be redefined so that it reflects the achievement of its ultimate ends and not simply its instrumental means (profit) to the realisation of these aims. We ought then to revise our fundamental assumptions about the structures and policies that are necessary for business to achieve its real end of social justice.

This study is one of five such studies dealing with the general subject of growth which have been undertaken recently in the School of Business of North Texas State College. This study is the third in the series and is concerned, as were the previous studies, with the general subject of growth. However, this third study is concerned with the compound annual rates of growth, during definite economic epochs, of net profit after taxes for more than 150 prominent corporations. The problem involved in this study is threefold: (1) to determine what constitutes growth, (2) to determine which corporations are growing, and (3) to determine as nearly as possible the growth characteristics of the corporations employed.

The first problem involved in this study is to determine what growth is. The second problem of this thesis is to determine the characteristics of growth during the previous economic epochs. The third problem is to determine what companies are growing. This will be accomplished by the use of a representative list of American corporations.

Thesis (MDF)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The earnings of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) depend entirely on their reinvestment rate of capital. A quicker reinvestment rate of capital would not be possible when debtor’s collection period and stockholding period is slow, nor will it be possible with a shorter creditor’s payment period. Therefore, working capital management is fundamental when it comes to the overall performance of small and medium enterprises. As a result, this study examines the impact of working capital management on the profitability of small and medium enterprises in South Africa. Working capital management has a direct relationship with profitability. The data selected in this study consists of all firms listed on AltX, which is a division of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, for the period 2000 to 2013. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis were used to evaluate the data collected and the results concurred with the relationship found between working capital management and profitability. Specific variables such as the cash conversion cycle, debtors’ collection period, stockholding period and creditor’s payment period are all associated with the profitability of firms. The dependent variable is return on assets and is the measure of profitability in this study. Furthermore, the results of this study may provide significant insight for financial analysts, shareholders, creditors and managers.

Thesis (MBA.) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / This research examines the effect of human capital investment on the firm’s performance in South African companies. This research is important given that the human asset has been proven to be one of the most important assets in the organisation and therefore this research set out to examine whether human assets actually contribute to the performance of the firm in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange Social Responsible index (SRI). Therefore the objective of this research was to examine the relationship between human capital investment and firm performance in terms of sales turnover, share price and net profit. Secondary data on human capital investment and companies’ performance (sales turnover, net profit and share price) were collected from integrated report archives of the 28 best performing companies in the JSE SRI Index for the six years from 2010 to 2015. The theoretical foundation was on the human capital theory and related previous literature. The research adopted a quantitative paradigm and applied the regression statistics, which were analysed with the aid of the excel software. Findings from the regression analysis indicate p value of 0.04 for HCI and sales turnover, p value of 0.69 for HCI and the share price and p value of 0.16 for HCI and net profit. This therefore, means that, within the sample of companies, there is a significant relationship between human capital investment and sales turnover of firms and no significant relationship between human capital investment and share price, and net profit of companies. This finding indicates that the result may change from negative to positive with a longer period of data. Over the long term companies that invest in HC would experience profitability (within a range of 10 to 13 years) (Blundell et al, 1999).This means that future research should use a longer period of data and include more companies outside of the JSE SRI Index companies. The research recommends that there is a need for companies to invest in human capital to improve companies’ performance and to win customers’ confidence.

This dissertation uses original datasets from the U.S. and Japan to explore issues in spatial economics and public finance. In the first chapter, I study how the relocation of inventors affects local and aggregate growth through technological diffusion across U.S. cities. I propose a quantitative spatial theory of growth and knowledge diffusion through internal migration. My model highlights two mechanisms by which productivity growth can be higher in one city than in another: (1) agglomeration forces and (2) knowledge inflows through internal migration. Using data on US cities, I find that knowledge diffusion explains approximately 40 percent of the spatial variation in productivity changes, and agglomeration forces explain the rest. I quantify the dynamic effects of place-based policies and find that reducing the costs of migrating to a small number of cities can improve aggregate efficiency while reducing disparities in productivity across cities. Growing spatial inequality has led policymakers to enact tax breaks to attract corporate investment and jobs to economically peripheral regions. In the second chapter, co-authored with Cameron LaPoint, we demonstrate the importance of multi-plant firms’ physical capital structure for the take-up and efficacy of place-based policies by studying a national bonus depreciation scheme in Japan which altered the relative cost of capital across locations, offering high-tech manufacturers immediate cost deductions from their corporate income tax bill. Combining corporate balance sheets with a registry containing investment by plant location and asset type, we find the policy generated big gains in employment and investment in building construction and in machines at pre-existing production sites, with an implied partial equilibrium fiscal cost per job created of $16,000. The policy produced a welfare gain of $56.72 billion, or roughly 40% of one year’s worth of average annual corporate profits. For eligible firms, plant-level hiring in ineligible areas outstripped that in eligible areas, suggesting reallocation of resources within firms’ internal capital and labor markets mitigates the spatial misallocation inherent in subsidizing low-productivity areas. How governments should choose the frequency of payments has received little attention in the literature on the optimal design of benefits programs. In the third chapter, co-authored with Cameron LaPoint, we propose a simple model in which the government chooses the interval length between payments, subject to a tradeoff between the costs of providing more frequent benefits and welfare gains from mitigating consumption non-smoothing. Using a high-frequency retail dataset that links consumers to their purchase history, we apply the model to the Japanese National Pension System. Our evidence suggests suboptimal intra-cycle consumption patterns with negligible retailer price discrimination. Model calibrations support the worldwide prevalence of monthly payment systems.

The Securities and Exchange Conunission (1974) has stated that the one of the fundamental underpinnings of federal securities law is the external auditor opinion of registrant financial statements. The SEC believes that the corporate practice of voluntary auditor change may be perceived by the investing public as attempted opinion shopping. The monitoring hypothesis of Jensen and Meckling (1976), on the other hand, posits that companies may change auditors in an attempt to control net agency costs. The objective of this dissertation is determine if the monitoring hypothesis is descriptive of the phenomenon of voluntary auditor change. The monitoring hypothesis posits that changes in net agency costs are related to the change in auditor quality at the time of an auditor change. and that both changes in agency costs and change in auditor quality are related to the market reaction to the auditor change. Auditor changes from 1980 to 1986 for New York Stock Exchange and American Stock Exchange companies were analyzed. The results indicate that changes in agency costs are related to change in auditor quality, as measured by the difference, from the old auditor to the new, in the auditor's share of the industry audit fees for the company that is changing auditors. Significant variables that measure changes in agency costs aregrowth in company sales, change in long-term compensation plans, and change in the dividend payout ratio. The results also indicate that changes in agency costs are related to market reaction to a change in auditors, but that the change in auditor quality is not. Variables that are significant in explaining the relationship are change in the debt ratio, change in the holdings of the largest stockholder, and prior receipt of a qualified opinion or disclosure of a disagreement between the company and the previous auditor. The results provide strong support for the monitoring hypothesis and weak support for the opinion shopping hypothesis. / Ph. D.