Large US Corporations Research Articles

Comparing Sustainability Practices of Large US Corporations: Domestic vs. International Operations

Large US corporations are leading the way in reshaping business practices despite the absence of a national consensus regarding sustainability policies. This study highlights the commitment of some large US corporations to environmental, social, and corporate governance criteria and their widely employed sustainability practices compared with other global corporations. A survey of Fortune 500 corporations was conducted to identify their commitment to the nine major sustainability practices across domestic and international operations. Our findings indicate that several of the surveyed corporations exhibited significant adoption of these practices both domestically and internationally. Both hypotheses were rejected in favor of alternate hypotheses.

Headquarters locations of the largest US corporations: uneven geographies and migrations

The headquarters of large corporations are the main asset of the economies of the largest cities in the developed world. Based on materials from Fortune-500 companies, an analysis of the spatial dynamics of corporate headquarters in US MSAs for 1980–2019 was carried out. Mapping and geographic analysis of the concentration and directions of migration made it possible to identify the main changes in the spatial pattern of the location of economic decision-making centers in the United States. Headquarters remain highly concentrated: half of them are located in the largest MSAs by population. In terms of revenue, MSA Fayetteville (Arkansas, headquarters of Walmart) stands out, in terms of market value - San Jose (the heart of Silicon Valley, only 36 in population), in terms of the number of employees - MSAs in which retail companies are located (Minneapolis, Atlanta). Geographic mobility of corporate headquarters has increased dramatically over the past 40 years. The main directions of migration: from the Northeast and from California to the MSA New York, the (Post-)Industrial Great Lakes (MSA Chicago), Texas, to the South (MSAs Atlanta and Charlotte) and the Pacific West. There are noticeable trends towards industry agglomeration: IT companies are moving to California, and financial firms are leaving it, moving to Texas. The main areas for the emergence of new headquarters of the largest corporations are: New York, (Post-)Industrial Great Lakes, the South, Texas and the Pacific West. In addition to the usual MSAs-leaders - New York (10% of all new headquarters), San Jose (10%), Chicago, Dallas and Houston - Denver and Richmond stand out. The spatial concentration of locations for new headquarters continues to increase. At the same time, at least one new headquarters appeared in ⅔ of the agglomerations. The identified trends in the migration of existing and the emergence of new corporate headquarters suggest significant shifts in the economic geography of the United States. The rapid growth of cities in the South and Inland South-West shows that the economies of these areas have reached a new level, expressed in the formation of their own “gateways” to the global economy.

How Does Environmental Data from ESG Concept Affect Stock Returns: Case of the European Union and US Capital Markets

This article examines the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of firms, with a focus on the environmental pillar of the ESG concept. It is believed that the price of equities as well as sector-specific characteristics may be affected by ESG data. It also contributes to the argument that environmental performance and governance quality are related. The purpose of this paper is to statistically validate the separated environmental data from the ESG concept and investigate its impact on the equity price in the EU and the United States. Using simple linear regressions and a fixed effect panel data model, the association between environmental score and governance score, as well as equity price and environmental score, was estimated. This study examines the 500 largest US corporations comprising the S&P 500 index (S&P) and the 600 largest EU companies comprising the STOXX Europe 600 index (STOXX) (SXXP). This article analyzes ESG statistics for the period 2015–2020. The results indicate that a higher government score has a favorable effect on environmental pledges and that changes in stock price depend in part on environmental data. The novel contribution of this paper is that the results suggest a sector-specific contribution to the model, and it would be fascinating to analyze sector disparities and their ESG-related policies in greater detail. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-02-08 Full Text: PDF

Accounting for cryptocurrencies under FASB and the financial reporting impact on large US corporations in 2020 and beyond

Accounting for cryptocurrencies under FASB and the financial reporting impact on large US corporations in 2020 and beyond

Organizational structure and CEO dominance

We explore the effects of chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) personal dominance—an idiosyncratic character trait strongly associated with a desire for influence and control—on two fundamental organizational design decisions: the CEO’s span of control (1) and her delegation of responsibilities as reflected in the appointment of a chief operating officer (COO) (2). Linking three original measures of CEO dominance based on quarterly earnings calls with manually collected data on span of control and COO positions for a sample of CEOs presiding over large US corporations, we demonstrate that CEOs who are high in dominance have a significantly larger personal span of control and delegate fewer decision rights than less-dominant CEOs. We discuss implications of our findings and future questions from an organizational design perspective.

Organizational Structure and Decision-Making in Corporate Venture Capital

This paper studies corporate venture capital (CVC) units of large US corporations to learn how they make decisions across several areas: internal organization of CVC units, relationships with parent companies, CVC unit objectives, investment process and approval, deal structure, relationship with portfolio companies, compensation, and composition of CVC teams. The study is conducted by interviewing senior team members of seventy-four CVC units, representing 78% of the active CVC units of companies in the S&P 500 index. CVC units are organized in significantly more diverse ways than institutional VC firms. Unlike institutional VC firms, most CVC units do not manage committed venture funds, but instead invest from the balance sheets of their parent companies. Investment committees, in which parent company executives play a pivotal role in approving individual decisions, are common. Many corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) believe executives at their parent companies do not understand the norms of the venture space. The demographic composition of senior team members at CVC units is very different than that of their counterparts at institutional VC firms. The results raise a number of issues about the economic role of CVC units in corporate innovation.

Quad-qualified audit committee director: Implications for monitoring and reducing financial corruption

Financial corruption has an extensive adverse impact on corporate stakeholders. Over the last two decades, numerous prescriptions have been offered to improve the governance of US public firms, yet financial corruption is still prevalent. Board of directors' audit committees are typically charged with the responsibility of assuring that the corporation's financial reports satisfy the criterion of accuracy. We propose that a quad-qualified audit committee director can serve as an exemplar corporate overseer of financial reporting and minimize the likelihood of corruption. We predict that by having the qualifications of independence, directorship experience and financial expertise, bandwidth, and stock ownership, the effectiveness of monitoring financial reporting by such a director will be considerably enhanced, thus complementing the benefits of the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) enacted in 2002. To test our predictions, we employed a time-lagged, matched-pairs sample of 328 large US corporations (164 financially corrupt firms plus a comparison group of 164 compliant firms). Controlling for covariates, we found that the presence of a quad-qualified audit committee director reduced the likelihood of financial corruption in a public firm by 72%. Combined with the benefits from SOX, having at least one quad-qualified audit committee director decreased the probability of financial corruption by 92%. Our results also show that having just one quad-qualified audit committee director is more effective than the combination of the individual qualifications dispersed among the committee members.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002: Relationship to Magnitude of Financial Corruption and Corrupt Organizational Cultures

Absent field research that responds to whether the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) meets its goal to reduce financial corruption, our understanding of the effectiveness of SOX is incomplete. Because financial corruption results in a substantial adverse impact on a multitude of organizational stakeholders, such understanding is valuable to inform decisions on enforcement of SOX and develop effective regulatory interventions. The purpose of this study was to empirically assess the impact of SOX on financial corruption. We conducted a thorough review of 2,585 Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases available from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and identified 70 and 32 cases of financial corruption in large US corporations that occurred before and after SOX was enacted in 2002, respectively. Deceptive practices were typically pervasive, extended over multiple years, involved large stakeholder damages, and perpetrated by senior leaders (e.g., CEOs, CFOs, VPs, boards of directors). We provided empirical evidence that SOX effectively reduced corrupt behaviors. Namely, the financial restatement magnitude, a measure of the magnitude of financial corruption, declined after SOX compared to before SOX. Also, the perpetrator group size, a measure of the extent the organizational sub-culture was corrupt, was smaller after SOX was enacted. This study has novel implications that offer important contributions to research and practice.

Tax-Exempt Lobbying: Corporate Philanthropy as a Tool for Political Influence

We explore the role of charitable giving as a means of political influence. For philanthropic foundations associated with large US corporations, we present three different identification strategies that consistently point to the use of corporate social responsibility in ways that parallel the strategic use of political action committee (PAC) spending. Our estimates imply that 6.3 percent of corporate charitable giving may be politically motivated, an amount 2.5 times larger than annual PAC contributions and 35 percent of federal lobbying. Absent of disclosure requirements, charitable giving may be a form of corporate political influence undetected by voters and subsidized by taxpayers. (JEL D22, D64, D72, L31)

The Impact of Job Referrals on Employment Outcomes in Top Corporate Positions

Using an original dataset on professional networks of directors sitting on the boards of large US corporations, we examine how personal relationships are used by firms to improve job match quality in the high-skill segment of the labor market. Analyzing explicit social connection data between new hires and recruiters, we are able to test predictions of well established job referral models. We find that referred executive directors have a fifteen percent longer tenure than their non-referred counterparts. Referred executive directors also tend to be similar to their referrers on multiple dimensions, giving support to network homophily hypotheses.

A CRITICAL CASE STUDY ON QUALCOMM AS PIONEERS OF WIRELESS REVOLUTION

The company Qualcomm established in July 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and Seven at San Diego, California, the United States. Qualcomm is an American multinational company, it aims to design, develop semiconductors and market wireless telecommunications equipment's and services. Qualcomm derives most of its revenue from chip making and patent licensing businesses. Qualcomm has offices at almost 33 countries with a global workforce of approximately 35,400 employees. For the fiscal year 2018, Qualcomm reported annual revenue of US$21.301 billion, an increase of 2% over the previous fiscal cycle. Its shares traded between $51 and $75 per share, and its market capitalization at the end of fiscal 2018 was valued at US$105 billion. In the Fortune 500 list, the company ranks as 133rd in revenues among the largest US corporations. The company is focused on various industries like automotive, education, healthcare, networking, Internet of Everything, mobile computing, smart homes, smart cities, smart homes, and wearables. Qualcomm’s products include Gobi, Hy-Fi, IPQ, IZat, Powerline, Snapdragon, Small Cells, VIVE, Wi-Fi platforms , Mirasol, Pixtronix, AllPlay, 2net, Brew, HealthyCircles, QChat, QLearn, RaptorQ, Vuforia, Halo, and WiPower. In this paper, we are analysing business strategies of Qualcomm by studying various things like the corporate history, financial strategy, STEEP and SWOT analysis, target markets, key company challenges and legal issues o f Qualcomm.

Incorporating Literature And Big Questions Into Non-Literature Courses

Location: JC Room G During the 2018 fall semester, GMU School of Business instructors found that an interdisciplinary approach through the integration of literature and business produced new insights among our students on ethical decision-making in two courses we feature in the Business Foundations Area. Specifically, we learned that these narratives enhanced student understanding of the complex ethical questions surrounding stakeholder involvement and sustainable development decisions. In Business and Society, a course designed to introduce students to the complex relationships among large US corporations and a broad range of stakeholders, we experienced good results incorporating the novel March by Congressman John Lewis. Through its depiction of the social and emotional life of a young African American living in the segregated South, this narrative provides alternative representations of the modern business enterprise and what it represented to minority Americans in terms of doctrines of prosperity and economic opportunity We incorporated a discussion and written assignment of the first of his three graphic novels in a class session we feature on the ethics of relationships between businesses and consumers. Many students were surprised from this first-person narrative of the extent of the limitations African-Americans faced as consumers and how recently these were in place in the United States. Other students gained new insights into the impact of the boycotts John Lewis and colleagues organized. In a second course, Business 200: Global Environment of Business, we introduced on a trial basis the novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid to present competing views of ethical gray areas as they pertain to sustainable development in the developing world. Previously, we had focused exclusively on the visionary tale of sustainable development in the developed world as presented in the book Cradle to Cradle by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. We found that comparing and contrasting the ethical decision-making in a developing world economy with that of a developed world exposed students to visions and values of others within the context of their own aspirations and values. In addition, we noticed that the introduction of the second book enriched the dialogue between our US-born and foreign-born students—many of whom spent childhood years in a developing-world setting—concerning what constitutes ethical decision making, what sustainable development goals can be addressed in the short term and long term, and how business leader decision-making and obligations might align and differ in the two diverse settings.

Pacific National Industries, Inc.

Eric Walsh, newly promoted director of aviation for Pacific National Industries, Inc. (PNI), is one week away from having to make his very first presentation to the company's COO and CFO. PNI is one of the country's largest chemical companies, and maintained four aircraft and a team of flight and maintenance crewmembers to facilitate executive travel to and from the company's many plants and operating complexes. Walsh enters his new position and learns how badly the aviation division needs updating: the planes need refurbishment or replacement, the staff might need retraining, and PNI has just acquired a new company that comes with its own flight division—so Walsh also needs to figure out how that fleet factors into PNI's existing one, if at all. With only a week left to prepare for his meeting, Walsh must decide where to focus his presentation. Excerpt UVA-G-0646 Apr. 18, 2019 Pacific National Industries, Inc. Eric Walsh walked across the tarmac toward the flight operations building for Pacific National Industries, Inc. (PNI). He had flown PNI COO Dwight Daniels and senior vice president and CFO Meredith Ackerman back from the company's newly acquired agribusiness in Memphis, Tennessee. Daniels and Ackerman had spoken briefly about the meeting next week, wherein Walsh would present the strategic outlook for the flight department. That meeting was weighing heavy on Walsh's mind. He had been promoted to director of aviation following former director Kevin McNamara's retirement. McNamara had been comfortable with the status quo, and the department now needed a major overhaul, according to the results of an outside consulting report. The Company PNI was one of the nation's largest chemical companies, producing and marketing chemicals, fabricated fibers, explosives, propellants, and agricultural products. PNI's goods were used in a broad range of industries throughout the world. With 2018 sales expected to exceed $ 20 billion, PNI was ranked among Fortune's 200 largest US corporations. . . .

Papers to patents.

The withdrawal of large US corporations from research is narrowing the scope of innovation. The withdrawal of large US corporations from research is narrowing the scope of innovation.

Considerations in Establishing a Rewards and Recognition Program for a Multi-Generational Digital Workplace in the United States: A Critically Appraised Topic

This paper critically appraises the topic of creating a rewards and recognition program in a large US corporation. The American workforce has been categorized into four generational groups with distinct traits. These groups have different, and sometimes conflicting, expectations of rewards and recognition. It is thus important to understand these traits and cater any corporate-wide rewards and recognition program that tries to engage such a multi-generational workforce. This paper, as it answers its research question, provides background into multi-generational workforce, some of its traits, and guidance about engaging such a workforce in a digital workplace. It makes recommendations to management to improve Rewards and Recognition process by making it transparent, crowdsourced, and more frequent; utilize digital recognition systems that provide ‘mobile first’ user interfaces with gamification; and provide sensitivity training to existing managers regarding the millennials.

What Do Performance Appraisals Do?

Performance appraisals, the evaluation of an employee’s job performance over the previous period by one’s supervisor, are a standard practice in virtually every organization. They are one of the most important, time-consuming, and unpopular tasks in management. Despite this, remarkably little is known about how performance appraisals operate, especially their consequences. Indeed, much of what is written from a practitioner perspective typically suggests that they do little. By contrast, we document empirical evidence of the importance of performance appraisals using data from a large US corporation. The results in this case show that appraisals are informative and directly influence many dimensions of employee outcomes, including employee bonuses, merit pay, employee promotions, and decisions to exit the firm. The evidence shows that the appraisal process here is consistent with a relational, open-ended view of employment. It is not consistent with the common economic view that performance appraisals simply settle-up contractually based employment relationships.

Greed and Fear in Network Reciprocity: Implications for Cooperation among Organizations.

Extensive interdisciplinary literatures have built on the seminal spatial dilemmas model, which depicts the evolution of cooperation on regular lattices, with strategies propagating locally by relative fitness. In this model agents may cooperate with neighbors, paying an individual cost to enhance their collective welfare, or they may exploit cooperative neighbors and diminish collective welfare. Recent research has extended the model in numerous ways, incorporating behavioral noise, implementing other network topologies or adaptive networks, and employing alternative dynamics of replication. Although the underlying dilemma arises from two distinct dimensions—the gains for exploiting cooperative partners (Greed) and the cost of cooperating with exploitative partners (Fear)–most work following from the spatial dilemmas model has argued or assumed that the dilemma can be represented with a single parameter: This research has typically examined Greed or Fear in isolation, or a composite such as the K-index of Cooperation or the ratio of the benefit to cost of cooperation. We challenge this claim on theoretical grounds—showing that embedding interaction in networks generally leads Greed and Fear to have divergent, interactive, and highly nonlinear effects on cooperation at the macro level, even when individuals respond identically to Greed and Fear. Using computational experiments, we characterize both dynamic local behavior and long run outcomes across regions of this space. We also simulate interventions to investigate changes of Greed and Fear over time, showing how model behavior changes asymmetrically as boundaries in payoff space are crossed, leading some interventions to have irreversible effects on cooperation. We then replicate our experiments on inter-organizational network data derived from links through shared directors among 2,400 large US corporations, thus demonstrating our findings for Greed and Fear on a naturally-occurring network. In closing, we discuss implications of our main findings regarding Greed and Fear for the problem of cooperation on inter-organizational networks.

Doing Well by Reporting Good: Reporting Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Performance

AbstractThis article aimed to examine the impacts of reporting‐type corporate responsibility activities (CRA‐R) on corporate social and financial performance. Academic research has explored how varying attributes of markets, industry sectors and firms might shape corporate social and financial performance, but includes little effort to examine the impacts of different kinds of CRA on corporate performance. We build on debate about the value of firms' reporting activities related to corporate responsibility. Recent literature suggests that CRA‐R is superficial marketing or “greenwashing.” Despite this viewpoint, corporate reporting activities related to responsibility are rising. In order to solve this puzzle, this article explores the impact of CRA‐R on corporate performance. First, drawing from the institutional perspective, we propose that CRA‐R will positively impact corporate social performance (CSP) oriented toward secondary stakeholders. Second, combining the stakeholder–agency perspective and corporate responsibility literature, we motivate the hypotheses that CRA‐R positively influences corporate financial performance (CFP). Empirical testing with a unique dataset of large US corporations selected in the Fortune 500 support the proposed hypotheses. In particular, both corporate social responsibility and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) activities positively influence corporate environmental performance, and financial performance. In particular, GRI reporting is a strong indicator to impact both social and financial performance. Our findings indicate that CRA‐R should not simply reflect shallow motivations, but deliver value to noninvestor stakeholders as well as investors.

Report: US policy in Honduras causes migration

The delegation’s report is unusually critical of US foreign and immigration policies a return in some ways to labour condemnation of US intervention during the civil wars in Central America INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 25 Volume 22 Issue 1 2015 Although the report doesn’t mention it, the head of the dockers’ union, Victor Crespo, was forced to flee Honduras after his father was killed and mother injured, and he himself received threats to his life. A support campaign by the US International Longshore and Warehouse Union helped save his life, and eventually won guarantees that allowed his safe return to Honduras. The AFL-CIO report condemns a plan to ‘reduce the wage bill’ in the public sector by cutting jobs and privatising public services, especially in electricity. It points out that this reflects the policies of the International Monetary Fund, which called for cutting the public sector from 7.5 percent of GDP to 2 percent in four years. The resulting job loss has a clear impact on increasing poverty, forcing many Hondurans to migrate in search of survival. The report makes the case that poverty in Honduras has been deepened by the impact of the Central American Free Trade Agreement: ‘today, Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America’. Poverty rose from 60 to 64.5 percent from 2006 to 2013. By emphasising a policy that deregulated business and used low wages as an incentive to attract foreign investment, ‘CAFTA only exacerbated the desperation and instability in Honduras’, it charges. ‘Honduran workers identified the 2009 Honduran coup d’état and the subsequent militarisation of Honduran society, and the implementation of CAFTA and its impact on decent work and labour rights, as two essential elements to understanding the current crisis’. Backing up the increasing militarisation of Honduran society is US military aid, which reached $27 million in 2012. The report notes that both Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield and Commander John Kelly of the United States Southern Command praised Honduran ‘advances in security’. In the US media, General Kelly has demonised migration from Central America, calling the movement of families and children a national security threat and a ‘crime-terror convergence’. That migration, described in the AFL-CIO report, has grown sharply. More than 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children arrived in the United States in 2014 alone. ‘In 1990, there were approximately 109,000 Honduran migrants in the world. In 2010, that number grew close to 523,000, with the vast majority living in the United States’, it says. ‘Today, migration is seen by many families as a means to escape violence or seek employment opportunity or reunite with family, while the government has embraced the remittances from migrants as a major economic resource’. Three quarters of those migrants, arriving in the I n the wake of the political crisis in the United States last year, caused by the migration of large numbers of children from Central America to the US/Mexico border, the AFL-CIO in November sent a delegation to Honduras, the country that sent the greatest number of unaccompanied minors. ‘What we witnessed’, reported Tefere Gebre AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, ‘was the intersection of our corporate-dominated trade policies with our broken immigration system, contributing to a state that fails workers and their families and forces them to live in fear’. The report, in fact, contains a frank assessment of the history of US foreign policy in Honduras, and draws out the disastrous consequences it has created in that country today. ‘The fate of Honduras long has been tied to that of the United States’, it charges. ‘Throughout the 20th century, Honduras was key to maintaining US military and economic interests on the isthmus. The US military intervened in Honduran politics throughout the early 20th century to protect the foreign investments of large US corporations like the United Fruit Co. Later, Honduras served as a base of operations during the US-supported 1954 coup in Guatemala, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and during the years of civil war and Cold War proxy wars in Central America in the 1970s and ‘80s, the government provided support for the ‘Contra...

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters: C. L. Dellums and the fight for fair treatment and civil rights

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters created a sea of change in labour and race relations in the US. For the first time in US history, a black labour union played a central role in shaping labor and civil rights policy. Based on interviews and archival research, this new book tells the story of the union and its charismatic leader C.L. Dellums, starting from the BSCP's origins as the first national union of black workers in 1925. In 1937, the BSCP made history when it compelled one of the largest US corporations - the Pullman Company - to recognize and negotiate a contract with a black workers' union. C. L. Dellums was a leading civil rights activist as well as a labor leader. In 1948, he was chosen to be the first West Coast Regional Director of the NAACP. This book is an inspiring testament to both him and the unions transformative impact on US society.