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'Investor Protection and Corporate Governance' analyzes the impact of corporate governance on firm performance and valuation. Using unique datasets gathered at the firm-level—the first such data in the region—and results from a homogeneous corporate governance questionnaire, the book examines corporate governance characteristics, ownership structures, dividend policies, and performance measures. The book's analysis reveals the very high levels of ownership and voting rights concentrations and monolithic governance structures in the largest samples of Latin American companies up to now, and new data emphasize the importance of specific characteristics of the investor protection regimes in several Latin American countries. By and large, those firms with better governance measures across several dimensions are granted higher valuations and thus lower cost of capital. This title will be useful to researchers, policy makers, government officials, and other professionals involved in corporate governance, economic policy, and business finance, law, and management.

Purpose Investigations of the quality of life (QoL) of young people have shown that psychological and behavioral problems are associated with lower subjective well-being. The QoL ratings of children and adolescents based on self-reports and proxy reports are significantly different. The aim of the present study was to examine youth self-reported and parent proxy-reported QoL and investigate the effects of age, gender and psychological/behavioral symptoms on the QoL reports of youth. We hypothesized that self-reported emotional and anxiety problems influence self-reported QoL, while proxy-reported behavioral problems influence proxy reports of QoL. Methods The sample consisted of 284 parent–child pairs. Youths were between the ages of 11 and 18 years, the mean age was 14.3 (SD 2.1) years, and 35.6% were males. The Inventory of Life Quality (ILK) scale was used to measure QoL, and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire was used to assess psychological and behavioral problems. Results Males had higher self-reported QoL than females, and younger children had better QoL than older children. Emotional peer problems and hyperactivity reported by youth and hyperactivity and conduct problems reported by parents predicted youth self-rated ILK. Only parent-reported psychological/behavioral problems predicted proxy-rated ILK. Conclusion The evaluation of QoL of children and adolescents should involve both self and proxy reports in order to capture the effects of various psychological/behavioral symptoms and the perspectives of both youth and parents.

Background: Self-report physical activity (PA) scales, accelerometry, and heart rate (HR) monitoring are reliable tools for PA measurement for children with cerebral palsy (CP); however, there are limitations for those who are primary wheelchair users. The purpose of our study was to evaluate face and construct validity of the PROMIS® Pediatric PA parent proxy short form 8a in measuring PA amount and intensity in children with CP who are non-ambulatory. Methods: Face validity: Semi-structured interviews with parents and pediatric physical therapists (PTs) were conducted about the appropriateness of each item on the PROMIS® Pediatric PA short form. Construct validity: Children with CP who were non-ambulatory participated in a one-week observational study. PA amount and intensity were examined using PA monitors (Actigraph GT9X) and HR monitors (Fitbit Charge 4). Activity counts and time in sedentary and non-sedentary intensity zones were derived and compared to the PROMIS® T-scaled score. Results: Twenty-two physical therapists (PTs) and fifteen parents participated in the interviews, and ten children completed 1-week PA observation. Eight and seven participants completed sufficient time of uninterrupted PA and HR monitor wear, respectively. Parents and PTs agreed that several questions were not appropriate for children with CP who were non-ambulatory. PA intensity via activity counts derived from wrist worn monitors showed a strong positive correlation with the PROMIS® PA measure. Conclusions: Construct validity in our small sample was established between PROMIS® scores and accelerometry activity counts when documenting PA amount and intensity; however, there were some differences on PROMIS® face validity per parent and PT respondents. Despite some concerns regarding face validity, the PROMIS® Pediatric PA parent proxy short form 8a shows promise as a valid measure of physical activity amount and intensity in non-ambulatory children with CP, warranting further investigation and refinement.

When Harlequin Enterprises acquired British publisher Mills & Boon in 1972, the merged firm became the world’s dominant publisher of popular romance novels. Little is known, however, about the role that innovative marketing strategies played in the growth of these two romance publishing companies, especially their use of product sampling, direct mail, product standardization, and what was known at Mills & Boon as the “personal touch.” Through research in the Mills & Boon company archive at the University of Reading, the Grescoe Archive at the University of Calgary, as well as an analysis of company histories, trade publications, interviews, and marketing techniques, this study reveals how Harlequin and Mills & Boon took a different approach to product promotion than traditional publishers. Their innovation was to incorporate consumer goods marketing strategies, familiar to other industries, that disrupted and redefined standard practices of book publishers.

Convergence among industries has made network data loss prevention (DLP) more important, in that in the IT-convergence environment, web mail is utilized as a means of information delivery. The web mail used in various industries has two facets: convenience for information transfer, and vulnerability to leakage of confidential information. Monitoring blocking and logging of web mail are a few of the major security methods that have been employed for prevention of such leakage. However, application of HTTP over SSL (HTTPs) to web mail systems such as Gmail has revealed the limitations of existing web mail security methods in controlling web mail. Most importantly, the existing method cannot control encrypted contents of web mail. In this paper, we propose a method that controls HTTPs web mail contents by using a proxy server and distributing the secure socket layer (SSL) certificate to user’ s PC. The proxy server plays the Certificate Authority role between the users’ PCs and the web mail server, distributing its own SSL certificates to the users’ PCs. The SSL certificate is the key to encryption and decryption of HTTPs web mail contents. Using the protocol derived in the present study, HTTPs web mail contents can be controlled as an effect of content-awareness. Network DLP is effected by monitoring, blocking and logging suspicious mail contents using HTTPs.

Using 1997-1999 annual performance evaluation data of 214 postal stores in Korea, we find that financial performance improves following the implementation of an incentive plan that includes relative performance measures, and that under this incentive plan, the degree of common uncertainty is positively associated with store profitability. We also find evidence that the incentive effect of the plan is mitigated in stores at which the employees' perceived unfairness is likely to be high. Finally, we find that the net benefits of introducing the incentive plan may be conditional on the degree of common uncertainty, which appears to be inversely related to the perceived unfairness attributable to the introduction of the contract with relative performance measures.

Spam mail filtering is a classic problem to automatically recognize irrelevance between incoming emails and user contexts. This paper proposes a novel proxy server architecture for (i) collaboratively integrating useful features sent from personal email clients. (ii) Improving the filtering performance of SMTP servers. Given a set of spam mails marked by multiple email users, the proxy server can extract two kinds of textual features, which are apriori terms and concept terms based on key phrases. More importantly, by taking into account the semantics and statistical associations, the proxy can aggregate them in a hierarchical cluster structure. As a result, spam ontology can be built, and also, incrementally enriched. Hence, the email clients can be supported to improve their performances of spam filtering by referring to the semantic information from the ontology. For evaluating the proposed system, we have collected a large number of spam mails within a same intranet environment. The system has shown 17.4% lower error rate of filtering than the single email clients.