There are two competing theoretical debates about the impact of ownership concentration on organisational outcomes, namely efficient-monitoring hypothesis and conflict-of-interest (strategic-alignment) hypothesis. New Zealand has a distinctively concentrated ownership structure. This raises an important research question: Does concentrated ownership in New Zealand perform an efficient monitoring or opportunistic function? This question remains unanswered due to the very limited research on ownership structure in New Zealand. This research considers three specific where studying the function of ownership concentration is likely to be insightful. Three contexts are: CEO compensation scheme, corporate voluntary disclosures and investor perception of ownership structure in the stock market. This research further contributes to the existing literature by decomposing ownership into four mutually exclusive groups, namely financial institution-, government-, management- and other company-controlled ownership structures. The different impacts of ownership concentration under each type of controlling ownership structure are investigated. The findings of Essay One reveal that concentrated ownership is a significant contributor to the poor CEO compensation pay-for-performance relationship in New Zealand listed companies. However, reduced ownership concentration promotes the alignment between CEO compensation and firm performance. These results imply that large shareholders in New Zealand do not play a monitoring role in curbing managerial power; rather it exacerbates the poor relationship between CEO compensation and firm performance. In Essay Two, regression results show that companies characterised by financial institution-controlled ownership structure tend to make significantly fewer (more) disclosures at high (low) concentration levels. In contrast, firm observations in the high concentration group with government- and management-controlled ownership structures have considerably higher voluntary disclosure scores compared with their low concentration counterparts. With respect to the linearity assumption, the relationship between ownership concentration and voluntary disclosure practices unveil a non-linear pattern, indicating that the efficiency of large shareholders’ monitoring varies with the level of intensity of ownership concentration. The results of Essay Three demonstrate that ownership concentration in general is positively associated with information asymmetry observed around annual report release date. This is supportive of investor-adverse selection towards ownership concentration, and such an adverse selection problem is strongly associated with financial institutional and managerial shareholdings. Also, ownership concentration decreases stock liquidity, so no result is found in line with the ownership concentration liquidity hypothesis. When voluntary disclosure is taken into account, regression results suggest that disclosure significantly attenuates information asymmetry risk related to ownership concentration. This effect is particularly pronounced for firms with management-controlled ownership structure. Findings highlight the importance of corporate disclosures under concentrated ownership structure in eliminating information asymmetry and enhancing market efficiency in New Zealand.

Det är en ständigt pågående debatt om huruvida belöningssystem fungerar som motivationsinstrument eller inte. Många, främst inom den psykologiska skolan, är kritiska till belöningssystem, trots detta finns de i alla organisationer. Kan denna förekomst förklaras av att det finns en annan skola, den ekonomiska, som är det dominerande synsättet hos företag? Syftet med denna uppsats är att ställa den psykologiska skolans motivationsuppfattning emot den ekonomiska i en analys, och utifrån denna se om det går att dra slutsatsen att det ekonomiska tankesättet är det som dominerar och därmed ge en förklaring till varför belöningssystem förekommer som motivationsverktyg i ett företag. För att kunna utreda detta har vi valt att göra en fallstudie på företaget Tempur och dess säljare, samt tagit hjälp av teorier ur såväl den psykologiska motivationsuppfattningen, Maslow och Herzberg, som den ekonomiska, economic man. Utifrån detta har vi dels dragit slutsatsen att den ekonomiska teorin dominerar såväl Tempurs antaganden om individen som säljarnas beteenden, dels att belöningar i form av pengar är den mest betydande faktorn för säljarnas motivation.

This thesis presents a challenge to policy initiatives that presume that patient-centered care will reduce racial disparities in health. Data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey were used to test patient assessment of provider behavior defined as patient-centered care according to the National Health Disparities Report of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the Department of Health and Human Services. Results indicated patient-centered care improves self-rated health status, but blacks still report worse health status than whites experiencing comparable patient-centered care. Further, black-white differences in patient-centered care had no affect on health status. Rival theories of black-white differences in health, including social class and health literacy, provided better explanations of disparities than assessment of provider behaviors. These findings suggest that policies designed to financially incentivize patient-centered care practices by providers should be considered with caution. While patient-centered care is better quality care, financial incentives could have a negative effect on minority health if providers are deterred from practices that serve disproportionate numbers of poor and less literate patients and their families. Measurement of the concept of patient-centered care in future health disparities research was also discussed.

The federal government is often criticized for performance that fails to meet the public's expectations. Its traditional pay system receives much of the blame for rewarding seniority instead of performance. While everyone agrees that performance matters, they don't always agree on the best way to improve it. My research investigates human resource management strategies designed to motivate better performance and productivity. Specifically, I examine the credibility and feasibility of implementing pay for performance throughout the federal government and identify ways that managers can promote greater productivity through human capital investment. I conduct an extensive review of work motivation theories and synthesize findings from previous academic and government studies in order to develop models that are tailored to the federal workplace. I test these models using federal survey data from the Merit Principles Surveys of 2000 and 2005. A variety of attitudes, perceptions, expectations, and work environment factors are expected to influence job performance. Findings reveal that pay for performance belief and success are greatly affected by performance management, fair treatment in all personnel matters, supervisory fairness in decision-making, and organizational culture. Further results indicate that managers can markedly improve productivity by ensuring employees are highly engaged in their work, delivering effective performance management, providing a supportive organizational culture, and giving employees adequate resources and training. With federal agencies constantly striving to improve performance and productivity, these findings have practical implications for government as they suggest ways that public managers can achieve better performance and greater productivity through increased work motivation.

The Catalyst 6500 is a modern commercial switch, capable of processing millions of packets per second through the utilization of specialized hardware. One of the main hardware components aiding the switch in performing its task is the Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM). TCAMs update themselves with data relevant to routing and switching based on the traffic flowing through the switch. This enables the switch to forward future packets destined to a location that has already been previously discovered - at a very high speed. The problem is TCAMs have a limited size, and once they reach their capacity, the switch has to rely on software to perform the switching and routing - a much slower process than performing Hardware Switching that utilizes the TCAM. A framework has been developed to analyze the switch’s performance once the TCAM has reached its capacity, as well as measure the penalty associated with a cache miss. This thesis concludes with some recommendations and future work.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (D. Ed.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-201). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Not available / text

No description available.

The Catalyst 6500 is a modern commercial switch, capable of processing millions of packets per second through the utilization of specialized hardware. One of the main hardware components aiding the switch in performing its task is the Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM). TCAMs update themselves with data relevant to routing and switching based on the traffic flowing through the switch. This enables the switch to forward future packets destined to a location that has already been previously discovered - at a very high speed. The problem is TCAMs have a limited size, and once they reach their capacity, the switch has to rely on software to perform the switching and routing - a much slower process than performing Hardware Switching that utilizes the TCAM. A framework has been developed to analyze the switch’s performance once the TCAM has reached its capacity, as well as measure the penalty associated with a cache miss. This thesis concludes with some recommendations and future work.