The pricing of infrastructure initial public offerings : evidence from Australia

This paper explores first-day returns on infrastructure entity initial public offerings (IPOs) in Australia from 1996 to 2007. While a good deal has been written on the first-day returns of industrial and mining company IPOs and Real Estate Investment Trust IPOs, first-day returns of infrastructure entity IPOs have yet to be reported in the literature. The study uses ordinary least squares regression analysis to identify factors that might influence the percentage first-day returns theoretically available to investing subscribers and factors that might influence the aggregate amount of money left to subscribers by issuers. The study finds that first-day returns, on average, are not significantly different from zero. There is evidence, however, that suggests higher dividend yields and higher percentage direct costs of capital raising influence these first-day returns. The study also finds that infrastructure entity IPOs that seek to raise more equity capital leave less money on the table for subscribing investors.

The influence of job, team and organizational level resources on employee well-being, engagement, commitment and extra-role performance : test of a model

Purpose – Worker well-being continues to be fundamental to the study of work and a primary consideration for how organizations can achieve competitive advantage and sustainable and ethical work practices (Cartwright and Holmes; Harter, Schmidt and Keyes; Wright and Cropanzano). The science and practice of employee engagement, a key indicator of employee well-being, continues to evolve with ongoing incremental refinements to existing models and measures. This study aims to elaborate the Job Demands-Resources model of work engagement (Bakker and Demerouti) by examining how organizational, team and job level factors interrelate to influence engagement and well-being and downstream outcome variables such as affective commitment and extra-role behaviour.

Design/methodology/approach – Structural equations modelling of survey data obtained from 3,437 employees of a large multi-national mining company was used to test the important direct and indirect influence of organizational focused resources (a culture of fairness and support), team focused resources (team climate) and job level resources (career development, autonomy, supervisor support, and role clarity) on employee well-being, engagement, extra-role behaviour and organizational commitment.

Findings – The fit of the proposed measurement and structural models met criterion levels and the structural model accounted for sizable proportions of the variance in engagement/wellbeing (66 percent), extra-role-behaviour (52 percent) and commitment (69 percent).

Research limitations/implications – Study limitations (e.g. cross-sectional research design) and future opportunities are outlined.

Originality/value – The study demonstrates important extensions to the Job Demands-Resources model and provides researchers and practitioners with a simple but powerful motivational framework, a suite of measures, and a map of their inter-relationships which can be used to help understand, develop and manage employee well-being and engagement and their outcomes.

Removal of company directors in a climate of corporate collapses

The string of high-profile corporate collapses recently has provided a fresh insight into many important topics and issues in Australian corporations law. Notwithstanding this, one topic that continues to receive inadequate attention both in Australia and in foreign jurisdictions is the statutory removal of  directors. In an earlier article published in this journal, one of the present authors contributed towards addressing this lack of commentary on the topic by highlighting a number of peculiarities with the provisions under the then Corporations Law regulating the removal of directors in public and proprietary companies. Since that time, the CLERP amendments to the Corporations Law (now Corporations Act 2001) in 2000 introduced some interesting changes to the provisions dealing with the removal of directors in public and proprietary companies. In this article, the authors provide an explanation and critical analysis of these changes, and consider the recent Western Australian Supreme Court decision of Allied & Mining Process Ltd v Boldbow Pty Ltd [2002] WASC 195, which deals with some of the issues raised by the authors in relation to the CLERP amendments. According to the authors, whilst some of the peculiarities raised in the earlier article no longer exist post-CLERP, the current removal provisions still raise some important questions of interpretation.

Stakeholder and gender characteristics of mining and energy IPO boards of directors

The mining and energy sectors are particularly publicly sensitive sectors and subject to a high degree of public scrutiny. Evan and Freeman (1993) suggest that such public scrutiny needs may be better met by having direct public stakeholder representation on the board of directors. Similarly, Bilimoria (2000) argues a strong commercial case for engaging women on boards. This paper investigates the number and proportion of non equity holding public stakeholder directors and the number and proportion of women directors on the boards of Australian mining and energy company initial public offerings (IPOs) and reports a paucity of public stakeholder directors and also a low proportional female representation on such IPO boards.

Mining frequent itemsets in distorted databases with granula computing

Data perturbation is a popular method to achieve privacy-preserving data mining. However, distorted databases bring enormous overheads to mining algorithms as compared to original databases. In this paper, we present the GrC-FIM algorithm to address the efficiency problem in mining frequent itemsets from distorted databases. Two measures are introduced to overcome the weakness in existing work: firstly, the concept of independent granule is introduced, and granule inference is used to distinguish between non-independent itemsets and independent itemsets. We further prove that the support counts of non-independent itemsets can be directly derived from subitemsets, so that the error-prone reconstruction process can be avoided. This could improve the efficiency of the algorithm, and bring more accurate results; secondly, through the granular-bitmap representation, the support counts can be calculated in an efficient way. The empirical results on representative synthetic and real-world databases indicate that the proposed GrC-FIM algorithm outperforms the popular EMASK algorithm in both the efficiency and the support count reconstruction accuracy.

Recalling yesterday, predicting tomorrow : revisit South Australia conservation practice for heritage mining places, a practical guide for Malaysia

Mining started in South Australia in the early 1840s with the discovery of silver-lead ore at Glen Osmond in 1841 and later copper in Kapunda in 1842 and Burra in 1845; all these discoveries greatly contributed to South Australia's economic development. South Australia entered the mining era at the time when the Cornish engine was at the peak of its development, and the horizontal engine was beginning its rise in popularity. These South Australian historic mining sites contain extensive extant evidence of technology, innovation and human endeavours that previously went into the mining activity. This paper seeks to critically review items for inclusion on the South Australian State Heritage Register, the character of mining heritage places, enforcement by legislation, interpretation of the heritage assessment and how these practices could guide Malaysia in recognizing industrial heritage as a significant part of its cultural heritage that needs to be conserved, restored and managed as a legacy for present and future generations.

What do indigenous communities think of the CSR practices of mining companies?

This paper examines how one indigenous community in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) views the social responsibility initiatives of OK Tedi Mining Ltd (OTML). This mining operation has been controversial since its inception, and various operators of the mine have sought to engage the community and to undertake a number of CSR-related projects. Insights gained from four focus groups amongst the Ok Tedi River indigenous communities show that while some members of the community are satisfied with the company’s efforts at the macro level, many have reservations about the effectiveness of the programs at the micro level on the village and family unit. The implementation of CSR activities are slow and in many instances do not effectively address stakeholder concerns.

Data mining via minimal spanning tree clustering for prolonging lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Clustering is applied in wireless sensor networks for increasing energy efficiency. Clustering methods in wireless sensor networks are different from those in traditional data mining systems. This paper proposes a novel clustering algorithm based on Minimal Spanning Tree (MST) and Maximum Energy resource on sensors named MSTME. Also, specified constrains of clustering in wireless sensor networks and several evaluation metrics are given. MSTME performs better than already known clustering methods of Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and Base Station Controlled Dynamic Clustering Protocol (BCDCP) in wireless sensor networks when they are evaluated by these evaluation metrics. Simulation results show MSTME increases energy efficiency and network lifetime compared with LEACH and BCDCP in two-hop and multi-hop networks, respectively. © World Scientific Publishing Company.