scholarly journals Corporate governance and managerial opportunism: The case of us pension plans

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-530
Author(s):  
Sharad Asthana
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Pension Plan ◽  
Pension Plans ◽  
Retirement Benefits ◽  
Managerial Opportunism ◽  
External Monitoring ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Future Income ◽  
Empirical Tests

Insuring post-retirement benefits to retirees is a joint responsibility of the employees, employers, and the US government. Managers have been shown to manipulate pension plan reports with the intention of maximizing their own gains to the detriment of current and future retirees. External monitoring by regulators and auditors is effective in curbing this opportunistic behavior. This paper extends these findings to examine if effective internal monitoring in the form of strong corporate governance is instrumental in controlling manipulations of pension reports by managers. Empirical tests support the finding that effective corporate governance is inversely associated with the extent of managerial manipulations in pension plan reporting. This result should be of interest to employees, retirees, and the US Government that are trying to insure the future income of senior citizens.

Missing Participants and Beneficiaries From Private-Sector Pension Plans

2021 ◽  
pp. 088636872110451
Author(s):  
John G. Kilgour
Keyword(s):  
Pension Plan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pension Plans ◽  
Pension Benefit ◽  
Defined Benefit ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Social Security Administration ◽  
Retirement Benefits ◽  
Department Of Labor ◽  
For Profit

This article examines the problem of missing and nonresponsive participants and beneficiaries from defined-benefit (DB) and especially defined-contribution (DC) pension plans, mainly in the private (for profit) sector of the United States. It focuses on the current search requirements of the three government agencies involved in finding missing participants and beneficiaries: the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the Department of Labor (DOL) and its Employee Benefit Services Administration (EBSA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The article also reviews the efforts of the Social Security Administration (SSA) in this area. It then reviews proposed legislation, the Retirement Savings Lost and Found Act of 2020 (now S. 1730; RSLFA). The issue of missing participants and beneficiaries often becomes critical when an employer goes out of business or for some other reason stops sponsoring a pension plan. The missing participants are owed their earned retirement benefits. They, not the employer, own them.

Case Study

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 25-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold W. Burlingame ◽  
Michael J. Gulotta
Keyword(s):  
Pension Plan ◽  
Pension Plans ◽  
Defined Benefit ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Cash Balance ◽  
Retirement Benefits ◽  
Strategic Objectives

The potential for using a cash balance pension plan as a restructuring tool is one reason it is gaining favor throughout corporate America. Another reason is that it can give employees a better understanding and appreciation of their retirement benefits. Both reasons are important at a time when companies are changing rapidly and sometimes downsizing and when employees are less likely to stay in one place long enough to anticipate reaping the rewards of a defined bene-fit plan. Cash balance plans combine some of the best features of defined contribution (DC) and defined benefit (DB) plans. For employers, they provide more flexibility than traditional DB plans and help companies achieve their strategic objectives. For employees, they better meet the needs of a changing workforce by delivering portable, easily understood benefits. Since 1985, more than 200 companies have replaced their DB pension plans with a cash bal-ance design. One of the newest and most enthu-siastic proponents is AT&T, which, with the help of consulting firm ASA, Inc., designed a cash bal-. ance plan to help meet its restructuring goals.

scholarly journals Executive Pay and Labor’s Shares: Unions and Corporate Governance from Enron to Dodd-Frank

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanford M. Jacoby
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Pension Plan ◽  
Shareholder Activism ◽  
Pension Plans ◽  
Executive Pay ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Public Pension Plans ◽  
The U.S

AbstractThis article is an historical analysis of the U.S. labor movement’s shareholder activism during the 2000s, which was based on their pension-plan assets. During the previous decade, corporate governance had tilted to give shareholders greater voice in corporate decisions. The protagonists were public pension plans such as CalPERS. Come the 2000s, they were replaced by unions and union-influenced pension plans. Their agendas overlapped but union investors were distinctive in their use of shareholder activism to make companies more public-minded, raise labor’s organizing power, and challenge executive power by reliance not only on shareholder activism but also political activities. Labor’s signature issue was executive pay, which was a topic that that shareholder activists during the 1990s had avoided other than to push for stock-based pay. But three waves of corporate scandals during the following decade caused other shareholders to become skeptical of executive pay-setting methods. Union investors zeroed in on expensing and backdating of stock options, and fought for say on pay, the issue where they had the greatest impact. An interaction between private orderings and regulation now developed, whereby shareholder pay reforms found their way into law. With inequality a major social concern, unions repeatedly contrasted lofty executive pay to stagnant wages. Yet little was said about lofty payouts to shareholders, which may have been a more important driver of inequality than executive pay. The article ties corporate governance to larger social and political developments in the U.S., and to the labor movement, embedding corporate governance in historical context.

Pension discount rate and investor sentiment

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 781-792
Author(s):  
Fang Sun ◽  
Xiangjing Wei
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Discount Rate ◽  
Boards Of Directors ◽  
Investor Sentiment ◽  
Pension Plan ◽  
Capital Budgeting ◽  
Pension Plans ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Pension Liabilities

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how investor sentiment, proxied by Michigan consumer confidence index, affects the choice of defined benefit pension plan discount rates. Design/methodology/approach The authors use multivariate analysis to test our hypotheses. The dependent variable is defined pension plan discount rate and the testing variables are investor sentiment and a dummy variable representing underfunded status. Findings The authors find a negative and significant relation between investor sentiment and pension plan discount rate. During high (low) sentiment periods, pension discount rate tends to be adjusted downward (upward) discretionarily. Further analysis indicates the relationship between pension discount rate and investor sentiment is more pronounced for firms with underfunded pension plans. The results can be explained by limited attention effects, capital budgeting strategy and earning smoothing. Practical implications The empirical results of this study have important implications for corporate governance and regulation. Specifically, the results suggest the need for increased attention from boards of directors, auditors and regulators to reported pension liabilities, especially during periods of high investor sentiment when pension plan sponsors are more likely to adjust down pension discount rate and accordingly to increase pension liabilities. Originality/value The paper contributes to the extant literature by identifying investor sentiment as a new incentive of pension discount rate manipulation. The empirical results of this study also have important implications for corporate governance and regulation.

Corporate Governance in the US and Europe

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Owen ◽  
Tom Kirchmaier ◽  
Jeremy Grant
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
The Us

Der Aufschwung des Katastrophen-Kapitalismus

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 177-183
Author(s):  
Naomi Klein
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disaster ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Bush Administration ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

Fitting to its doctrine of preventiv war, the Bush Administration founded a bureau of reconstruction, designing reconstruction plans for countries which are still not destroyed. Reconstruction after war or after a “natural disaster” developed to a profitable branch of capitalist investment. Also the possibilities to change basic political and economic structures are high and they are widely used by the US-government and institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

Pathways to Legalization: Undocumented Mexican Immigrants in the US/Mexico Borderlands, 1942–1956

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Immigrant ◽  
Agricultural Laborers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Contract Laborers

In the 1940s, curbing undocumented Mexican immigrant entry into the United States became a US government priority because of an alleged immigration surge, which was blamed for the unemployment of an estimated 252,000 US domestic agricultural laborers. Publicly committed to asserting its control of undocumented Mexican immigrant entry, the US government used Operation Wetback, a binational INS border-enforcement operation, to strike a delicate balance between satisfying US growers’ unending demands for surplus Mexican immigrant labor and responding to the jobs lost by US domestic agricultural laborers. Yet Operation Wetback would also unintentionally and unexpectedly fuel a distinctly transnational pathway to legalization, marriage, and extended family formation for some Mexican immigrants.On July 12, 1951, US president Harry S. Truman’s signing of Public Law 78 initiated such a pathway for an estimated 125,000 undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers throughout the United States. This law was an extension the Bracero Program, a labor agreement between the Mexican and US governments that authorized the temporary contracting of braceros (male Mexican contract laborers) for labor in agricultural production and railroad maintenance. It was formative to undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers’ transnational pursuit of decisively personal goals in both Mexico and the United States.Section 501 of this law, which allowed employers to sponsor certain undocumented laborers, became a transnational pathway toward formalizing extended family relationships between braceros and Mexican American women. This article seeks to begin a discussion on how Operation Wetback unwittingly inspired a distinctly transnational approach to personal extended family relationships in Mexico and the United States among individuals of Mexican descent and varying legal statuses, a social matrix that remains relatively unexplored.

Functioning of Ukrainian Bureau in Washington D. C. (March 1939 – May 1940)

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
Danylo Kravets
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
College Degrees ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
General Functioning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
The Military

The aim of the Ukrainian Bureau in Washington was propaganda of Ukrainian question among US government and American publicity in general. Functioning of the Bureau is not represented non in Ukrainian neither in foreign historiographies, so that’s why the main goal of presented paper is to investigate its activity. The research is based on personal papers of Ukrainian diaspora representatives (O. Granovskyi, E. Skotzko, E. Onatskyi) and articles from American and Ukrainian newspapers. The second mass immigration of Ukrainians to the US (1914‒1930s) has often been called the «military» immigration and what it lacked in numbers, it made up in quality. Most immigrants were educated, some with college degrees. The founder of the Ukrainian Bureau Eugene Skotzko was born near Western Ukrainian town of Zoloczhiv and immigrated to the United States in late 1920s after graduating from Lviv Polytechnic University. In New York he began to collaborate with OUN member O. Senyk-Hrabivskyi who gave E. Skotzko task to create informational bureau for propaganda of Ukrainian case. On March 23 1939 the Bureau was founded in Washington D. C. E. Skotzko was an editor of its Informational Bulletins. The Bureau biggest problem was lack of financial support. It was the main reason why it stopped functioning in May 1940. During 14 months of functioning Ukrainian Bureau in Washington posted dozens of informational bulletins and send it to hundreds of addressees; E. Skotzko, as a director, personally wrote to American governmental institutions and foreign diplomats informing about Ukrainian problem in Europe. Ukrainian Bureau activity is an inspiring example for those who care for informational policy of modern Ukraine.Keywords: Ukrainian small encyclopedia, Yevhen Onatsky, journalism, worldview, Ukrainian state. Keywords: Ukrainian Bureau in Washington, Eugene Skotzko, public opinion, history of journalism, diaspora.

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