This dissertation presents empirical evidence intended to help answer two research questions. The first question asks whether executive compensation systems appear to exploit the bias in accounting-based performance measures in order to reduce the volatility in executive compensation and to allocate incentives more effectively across the range of activities performed by the executive. The second question asks whether compensation systems systematically differ between firms that use alternative accounting methods and whether any such systematic difference helps explain accounting choice. Parameters estimated in fixed-effects endogenous switching regression models were used to test the risk-shielding and incentive-allocation hypotheses. The models were estimated across a dataset consisting of 1151 executive-year observations of annual compensation paid to 222 top-level executives in 40 oil and gas firms. The dataset was partitioned by accounting method and separate models estimated for the full cost and successful efforts partitions. The tests provided modest support for the risk-shielding and incentive-allocation hypotheses, revealing that accounting measurement bias is used to focus incentives for effort in the exploration activity and to reduce executives' exposure to production risk. The design also allowed an estimate of the proportional change in compensation that was realized from the accounting choice actually made.

No description available.

This paper studies foreign currency adjustments in executive compensation (i.e. exclusionof foreign currency impacts from accounting-based performance metrics). In light of recent debates on the pros and cons of using non-GAAP adjustments in compensation, I propose a rational explanation for adjusting foreign currency concerning firm’s operating decisions. I employ real options theory to study foreign currency fluctuations in decision making. I show, both analytically and empirically, that Integration Level, the extent of coordinated activities or cross-border transactions between the parent and its foreign subsidiaries, can serve as an explanation. Firms with a high level of integration are less likely to adopt foreign currency adjustments. On average, firms consider foreign currency fluctuations to make corporate decisions; the usage of foreign currency adjustments in executive compensation is less likely to be a result of managerial opportunism.

Note:

The dissertation argues that the United States Army was a slaveholding institution. It explains how the military, the central instrument of statecraft in the 19th century, evolved as a national establishment while condoning and promoting slavery in its ranks. An empirical study of often ignored military pay records reveals that from the army’s foundation to the abolition of slavery, thousands of enslaved people served as officers’ servants and became integral to the military. In 1816, Congress authorized allowances, rations, and clothing for officers’ private servants while prohibiting the former custom of taking soldiers as servants. By reimbursing officers who held or hired enslaved servants, Congress not only sanctioned slavery but also subsidized and created incentives for officers to own, utilize and trade enslaved people. The dissertation shows that over three-quarters of officers, southerners and northerners alike, held slaves as servants during their military careers. Over 9,000 enslaved people were forced into the army, nearly three times more than the number of officers. The dissertation investigates the origins and scope of slavery within the army, the legal, fiscal, and violent mechanisms that sustained it, and the profound impact slavery had on the American military establishment. By analyzing the U.S. Army, the most dominant national establishment, as a slaveholding institution, this project adds to the expanding literature on the “slaveholding republic.” The dissertation goes beyond merely illustrating “slave power” in the federal army by offering a ground-level investigation into how slavery got its foothold in an important national organization. Virtually unnoticed by prior historians, some 180,000 payrolls in the National Archives reveal the mundane realities of enslaved military servants and their enslavers. Each document included servants’ names, physical descriptions, locations, and allowances paid for their subsistence. The dissertation utilizes an original database of thousands of payrolls identified, sampled, and digitized, particularly for this project. The database has over two million data points, which enable grasping the phenomena of military slavery and tracking down individual servants’ and enslavers’ trajectories. The data shows that officers carried enslaved servants wherever they went, regardless of local laws forbidding it – even in so-called “free states” in the continental United States, Mexico, and Europe. Nearly 13% of all officers’ pay expenses went directly to subsidize slavery. Ratio analysis demonstrates that the bureaucracy and funding mechanisms that evolved before 1816 kept enslaved servitude stable. Thus, until the Civil War (1861-1865) and the unmaking of slavery, the army – which expanded and protected the frontiers of an empire in the making – not only benefited from the slave market but was a significant force in its expansion. Moreover, permitting and subsidizing slavery in the army made the U.S. government complicit in its brutalities, including forced removals, human trafficking, and the separation of families. Military slavery developed gradually with the foundation, bureaucratization, and professionalization of an American military peace establishment. It evolved from 1797 to 1816 through competing policy objectives, resulting in an enduring bureaucratic (and euphemistic) workaround: “servants not soldiers.” Facing public criticism over officers’ abuse of soldiers’ labor, the army gradually “outsourced” officers’ servants through a dual process of privatization and racialization of military labor, differentiating between “public” and “private” service; between free, white soldiers and enslaved, black servants. Though serving slaveholders’ interests, the adopted solution of “Servants not soldiers” was a product of bureaucratic contingencies and ad-hoc decision-making and not a top-down policy orchestrated by a cabal of enslavers. Interestingly, a simple, basic question of reimbursement led somewhere perhaps unanticipated, ending in government-sponsored enslaved servitude. To add this level of contingency is not to make excuses, not to pose something akin to an “unthinking decision,” but to make us aware of the degree to which “the problem of slavery” was most frequently “solved” by accommodating it institutionally, rather than contesting it politically or morally. Thus, the dissertation illuminates an often-ignored aspect of the United States as a “slaveholding republic.”

The purpose of this study is to gain a knowledge of the salary schedule situation in the teaching profession, and to determine how this situation can be improved if teachers become interested and will furnish the leadership necessary in helping to construct schedules in the school systems.

In 2006–2007 ten public universities were utilizing responsibility center management (RCM), and that number increased to 24 in 2014–2015 (Jaquette, Kramer, and Curs, 2018), but little is known about the relationship between the implementation of RCM, faculty composition, and faculty compensation. Inequities in faculty composition and salaries exist based on gender and race/ethnicity. My study explored whether the implementation of RCM, an increasingly popular budget model in public higher education, was associated with further faculty salary and compositional inequities by gender and race/ethnicity. Deans, as heads of revenue centers under RCM, have increased budgetary power and decision-making responsibility. Organizational justice theory, specifically the tenets of distributive justice and procedural justice, grounded this study by connecting the implementation of RCM to the diffusion of decision-making throughout the organization and potential association with inequities in faculty composition and faculty compensation. This quantitative study examined the relationship of RCM with institutional average salary and numerical proportions of assistant professors on the tenure track at public, doctoral universities based on the 2015 Basic Carnegie Classification. I used difference-in-difference estimation to compare institutions that implemented RCM (treatment group) to institutions that did not (control group) to determine whether there were differences in salary and proportional trends for assistant professors by gender and by gender and race. In addition, I explored engineering in a specific set of analyses because it has been cited as a field that should especially benefit from an RCM budgeting approach. I compared the change in proportions of assistant professors of engineering by gender and by gender and race/ethnicity at universities within the sample. Finally, the annual salaries of a subset of assistant professors of engineering within the sample of doctoral institutions in the treatment and control groups in Ohio were compared. Across these different analyses, I did not find evidence that RCM implementation between FY2012 – FY2017 had a significant effect on average institutional salary generally or by gender or race/ethnicity for assistant professors broadly or within engineering, specifically. Lacking a comprehensive dataset with institutional and individual predictors of faculty compensation and composition, and as RCM models vary among institutions, these findings should be interpreted cautiously. As RCM did not appear to be associated with any changes in faculty composition or compensation practices, I did not find evidence that RCM implementation had a significant impact on the procedural justice (i.e., decision-making criteria and processes of deans or department heads) or distributive justice (i.e., salary amounts or proportions of who was hired by gender and race/ethnicity) of faculty composition or faculty compensation at public, doctoral universities. / Doctor of Philosophy / My study explored whether the implementation of responsibility center management, an increasingly popular budget model at public universities, was associated with differences in faculty salary and faculty numbers by gender and race/ethnicity. Deans, as heads of revenue centers under RCM, have increased budgetary power and decision-making responsibility. Organizational justice theory, specifically the tenets of distributive justice and procedural justice, grounded this study by connecting the implementation of RCM to the diffusion of decision-making throughout the organization and potential association with inequities in faculty composition and faculty compensation. I examined the relationship of RCM with institutional average salary and numerical proportions of assistant professors on the tenure track at public, doctoral universities. I compared institutions that implemented RCM to institutions that did not to determine whether there were differences in salary and proportions for assistant professors by gender and by gender and race/ethnicity. In addition, I explored engineering because it has been cited as a field that should especially benefit from an RCM budgeting approach. I compared the change in proportions of assistant professors of engineering by gender and by gender and race/ethnicity. Finally, the annual salaries of assistant professors of engineering at two universities in Ohio were compared. Across these different analyses, I did not find evidence that RCM implementation had a significant effect on salary or proportions of assistant professors; however, as my study had lots of limitations, and as RCM models vary among universities, these findings should be interpreted cautiously. As RCM did not appear to be associated with any changes, I inferred that RCM implementation did not have a significant impact on the procedural justice (i.e., decision-making criteria and processes of deans or department heads) or distributive justice (i.e., salary amounts or proportions of who was hired by gender and race/ethnicity) of faculty salary or proportions at public, doctoral universities.

This research sought to answer the question:"To what extent is the merit pay system at a state-supported university consistent with selected tenets of operant conditioning?" The population for this study consisted of one state-supported institution of higher education in the Commonwealth of Virginia that has a merit pay system. Nine department chairmen and six faculty members (two per academic rank--assistant, associate, and full professors) from the nine departments were randomly selected and interviewed. Two structured interview schedules were developed by the investigator to elicit the characteristics and perceptions of the current merit pay system in order to assess the extent to which the six tenets of operant conditioning were being applied in the merit pay system. In analyzing and presenting the results, the findings were presented according to general salary policy, demographic data and salary information, and the objectives of the study. The major findings of this study were: 1. The University does have a merit pay policy stated in the Faculty Handbook, but the investigator did not find evidence of a systematic procedure for determining faculty salary increases. 2. The department chairmen were better informed of the merit pay policy and procedures than the faculty members. In fact, faculty members were not familiar with the procedure for allocating merit increases. 3. A merit pay system was preferred by the majority of the department chairmen and faculty members over alternative salary policies. 4. The merit pay system at the University was not consistent with selected tenets of operant conditioning. 5. There were a limited number of rewards other than merit pay at the university that the department chairmen and faculty members believed were important. Some of the rewards that they considered important were tenure, promotion, reduced load, travel money, graduate or student assistant, release time, and good teaching schedules. Some rewards they desired to have at the University were parking space, free tuition for family, sabbatical leave, travel money, and release time. / Ed. D.

For the past two decades pension funds, and more specifically teacher pension funds, have experienced a rapid growth and an increased importance in the national and regional economies of the United States. The primary purpose of this study was to provide a descriptive examination of the legislative changes in the 50 state teacher retirement systems and the h relationship of these changes with selected state demographic variables over the fifteen-year period of time from July 1, 1969, to June 30, 1984. The research questions that guided this study were: 1) What are the existing characteristics of the 50 states; teachers retirement systems and selected state demographic variables? 2) What are the changes over a 15-year period of time of the 50 states; teacher retirement systems and selected state demographic variables? 3) What are the projected changes in the 50 teacher retirement systems? 4) What are the relationships between the following pairs of variables; a) change in retirement systems and change in state . variables, b) change in state variables and projected change in retirement systems, c) changes in retirement systems and projected changes in retirement systems, d) current retirement systems and projected change in retirement systems, and e) current demographic variables and projected changes in retirement systems? A survey instrument, designed to statistically explore the relationship of selected demographic characteristics with legislative changes in the 50 teacher retirement systems, over the fifteen-year period of time was administered nationally. The population for this study was the 50 state teacher retirement systems. Selected individuals representing systems were surveyed for specific factual information. The rate response from the 50 states was 100%. Statistical methods used to classify and summarize the numerical data were cross-tabulations and frequencies. Pearson r and Spearman Rho correlation statistics were used to determine relationships between pairs of variables. / Ed. D. / incomplete_metadata

The purpose of this study was to compare negotiated and non-negotiated salaries, salary-related benefits, and salary rankings of Tennessee K-12 instructional personnel, during the school year 1977-1978 through 1980-1981. An ancillary purpose was to determine what changes in those costs and rankings had occurred after the Education Professional Negotiations Act was implemented on January 1, 1979. A time-series design was used to historically describe and compare changes in the salaries, benefits, and rankings over a pre-contract era and a contract era. Average teachers' salaries, minimum state salaries, local supplements, retirement and social security, insurance, total basic costs, and average teacher's salary rankings were the variables compared between 34 sample contract and non-contract school districts of similar size (ADA enrollment) and wealth (total value assessment per pupil). It was concluded from principal findings that in the 34 Tennessee school districts: (1) Negotiations favored the average teacher's salary, (2) negotiations did not favor the average teacher's minimum state salary, (3) negotiations favored the average teacher's local supplement, (4) negotiations favored the average teacher's retirement and social security, (5) negotiations favored the average teacher's total basic cost, (6) negotiations favored the average teacher's paid insurance provisions, and (7) negotiations appeared to decentralize salary ranked school districts. Recommendations were brought forward from the study’s implications. / Ed. D.