Multiple directorships and corporate performance in Australian listed companies

How many directorships are too many? Globally, normative advice emphasises the importance of limiting the number of directorships any individual should hold due to the workloads they entail. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this view. Rather, there is a strong tradition of supporting multiple directorships as a mechanism for the firm to co-opt external resources. To explore the issue of director workloads and multiple directorships, we first consider the issues related to multiple directorships and outline the conclusions of extant international and Australian studies into multiple directorships. We then detail our objectives in undertaking this research and our approach to data collection. Our findings indicate that the incidence of multiple directorships in Australian listed companies is low. We also find that many of the apparent examples of multiple directorships are due to related entities, which share common directors and, due to the nature of these entities, have much lower workload requirements. Further, there does not appear to be any relationship between holding multiple directorships and firm financial performance. Finally, we discuss the implications for boards and those interested in governance, particularly the need to ensure governance recommendations and guidelines reflect empirical findings. We offer one solution to address the concerns of boards, investors, other stakeholders and the community regarding multiple directorships: board and individual director evaluations.

Risk technology in Australia: The role of the job seeker classification instrument in employment services

Promoted as the key policy response to unemployment, the Job Network constitutes an array of interlocking processes that position unemployed people as `problems' in need of remediation. Unemployment is presented as a primary risk threatening society, and unemployed people are presented as displaying various degrees of riskiness. The Job Seeker Classification Instrument (JSCI) is a `technology' employed by Centrelink to assess `risk' and to determine the type of interaction that unemployed people have with the job Network. In the first instance, we critically examine the development of the JSCI and expose issues that erode its credibility and legitimacy. Second, employing the analytical tools of discourse analysis, we show how the JSCI both assumes and imposes particular subject identities on unemployed people. The purpose of this latter analysis is to illustrate the consequences of the sorts of technologies and interventions used within the job Network.

The molecular basis of temperature compensation in the Arabidopsis circadian clock

Circadian clocks maintain robust and accurate timing over a broad range of physiological temperatures, a characteristic termed temperature compensation. In Arabidopsis thaliana, ambient temperature affects the rhythmic accumulation of transcripts encoding the clock components TIMING OF CAB EXPRESSION1 (TOC1), GIGANTEA (GI), and the partially redundant genes CIRCADIAN CLOCK ASSOCIATED1 (CCA1) and LATE ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL (LHY). The amplitude and peak levels increase for TOC1 and GI RNA rhythms as the temperature increases (from 17 to 27 degrees C), whereas they decrease for LHY. However, as temperatures decrease ( from 17 to 12 degrees C), CCA1 and LHY RNA rhythms increase in amplitude and peak expression level. At 27 degrees C, a dynamic balance between GI and LHY allows temperature compensation in wild-type plants, but circadian function is impaired in Ihy and gi mutant plants. However, at 12 degrees C, CCA1 has more effect on the buffering mechanism than LHY, as the cca1 and gi mutations impair circadian rhythms more than Ihy at the lower temperature. At 17 degrees C, GI is apparently dispensable for free-running circadian rhythms, although partial GI function can affect circadian period. Numerical simulations using the interlocking-loop model show that balancing LHY/CCA1 function against GI and other evening-expressed genes can largely account for temperature compensation in wild-type plants and the temperature-specific phenotypes of gi mutants.

The impact of target board recommendations in Australian takeovers

This paper examines the impact of targe board recommendations on the probability of the bid being successful in the Australian takeovers context. Specifically, we model the success rate of the bid as a binary dependent variable and target board recommendations or the board hostility as our key independent variable by using logistic regression framework. Our model also includes bid structures and conditions variables (such as initial bid premium, bid conditions, toehold, and interlocking relationship) and bid events (such as panel and bid duration) as our control variables. Overall, we find board hostility has statistically significant negative effect on the success rate of the bid and almost all control variables (except for the initial bid premium) are statistically significant with the correct sign. That is, we find toehold, the percentage of share required to make the bid becomes successful, and the unconditional bid have positive impact on the success rate of the bid, at least as predictive determinants prior to the release of any hostile recommendation. Consistent with Craswell (2004), we also find the negative relation between interlocking relationship and the success rate of the bid. Our finding supports that from target investors’ point of view, interlock is consistent with the negative story of self interest by directors. Finally, like Walking (1985), we find that the initial bid premium does not have influence on the success rate of the bid. Hence our results reinstate Walking’s bid premium puzzle in Australian context.