D espite the many undesirable outcomes of corporate misconduct, scholars have an inadequate understanding of corporate misconduct's causes and mechanisms. We extend the behavioral theory of the firm, which traditionally assumes away the possibility of firm impropriety, to develop hypotheses predicting that top management incentive compensation and poor organizational performance relative to aspirations increase the likelihood of financial misrepresentation. Using a sample of financial restatements prompted by accounting irregularities and identified by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, we find empirical support for both incentive and relative performance influences on financial statement misrepresentation.

Research on organizational aspirations has used various representations of firm-level aspirations and based those representations on various performance measures. To advance our understanding of the measurement of aspirations, we empirically compare three different aspiration models defined using six different performance measures to explain three different firm outcomes (financial misrepresentation, R&D spending, and income-stream uncertainty INTRODUCTIONHow do managers evaluate their own firm's performance? Some theoretical paradigms, such as the behavioral theory of the firm (or BTOF;Cyert and March [1963] 1992) tackle this question explicitly. Other approaches largely ignore how managers assess success, implicitly assuming they use either accounting or capital market performance measures. Yet, paradigms that attempt to explain strategic behavior must make some assumptions about how managers evaluate firm performance; even profit-maximizing models implicitly assume firms know their profits and understand how it compares to optimal profits. The BTOF argues that managers compare expected firm performance to aspiration levels that depend on prior aspirations, prior performance, and the performance of comparable firms. A large literature demonstrates that performance relative to aspirations (or "attainment discrepancy") influences risk taking (Bromiley, 1991;Fiegenbaum, 1990;March and Shapira, 1987;Miller and Chen, 2004;Miller and Leiblein, 1996;Singh, 1986). Attainment discrepancy also influences research and development (R&D) spending (Antonelli, 1989;Bromiley and Washburn, 2011;Chen and Miller, 2007;Palmer and Wiseman, 1999), capital structure (Miller and Bromiley, 1990), actual and intended firm growth (Greve, 2008;Wicklund and Shepherd, 2003), large-scale organizational change (Greve, 1998) (Iyer and Miller, 2008), and organizational misconduct (Harris and Bromiley, 2007).Despite abundant research using attainment discrepancy to explain firm behavior, differences in measuring aspirations demonstrate an insufficient level of theoretical and empirical understanding of organizational aspirations leading to two major problems. First, aspirations studies adopt one of several functional forms for aspirations without discussing the theoretical assumptions or methodological merits of the alternative forms. Second, most studies examining organizational aspirations measure performance using one measure without considering other performance measures. To address these problems, we compare functional forms for aspirations measures defined using a number of different performance measures.The issue we address, comparing a set of measures, differs from the standard measurement issue of validating or assessing the reliability of a single measure. The many extant studies employing one of these three measures collectively demonstrate nomological validity but do not resolve the problem of having several competing measures for the same construct, especially when each measure embodies a slightly different theoretical nuance about...

In this paper we elaborate on recently developed molecular switch architectures and how these new systems can help with the realization of new functions and advancement of artificial molecular machines. Progress in chemically and photoinduced switches and motors is summarized and contextualized such that the reader may gain an appreciation for the novel tools that have come about in the past decade. Many of these systems offer distinct advantages over commonly employed switches, including improved fidelity, addressability, and robustness. Thus, this paper serves as a jumping-off point for researchers seeking new switching motifs for specific applications, or ones that address the limitations of presently available systems.

This editorial to the special issue addresses the often overlooked question of the ethical nature of social enterprises. The emerging social entrepreneurship literature has previously been dominated by enthusiasts who fail to critique the social enterprise, focusing instead on its distinction from economic entrepreneurship and potential in solving social problems. In this respect, we have found through the work presented herein that the relation between social entrepreneurship and ethics needs to be problematized. Further, we find that a range of conceptual lenses and methodological approaches is valuable as the social entrepreneurship field matures.

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Distinguishing “business” concerns from “ethical” values is not only an unfruitful and meaningless task, it is also an impossible endeavor. Nevertheless, fruitless attempts to separate facts from values produce detrimental second-order effects, both for theory and practice, and should therefore be abandoned. We highlight examples of exemplary research that integrate economic and moral considerations, and point the way to a business ethics discipline that breaks new ground by putting ideas and narratives about business together with ideas and narratives about ethics.

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Various recent studies have shown that societal efforts to mitigate (e.g. “lockdown”) the outbreak of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused non-negligible impacts on the environment, especially air quality. To examine if interventional policies due to COVID-19 have had a similar impact in the US state of California, this paper investigates the spatiotemporal patterns and changes in air pollution before, during and after the lockdown of the state, comparing the air quality measurements in 2020 with historical averages from 2015 to 2019. Through time series analysis, a sudden drop and uptick of air pollution are found around the dates when shutdown and reopening were ordered, respectively. The spatial patterns of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) tropospheric vertical column density (TVCD) show a decreasing trend over the locations of major powerplants and an increasing trend over residential areas near interactions of national highways. Ground-based observations around California show a 38%, 49%, and 31% drop in the concentration of NO 2 , carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter 2.5 (PM 2.5 ) during the lockdown (March 19–May 7) compared to before (January 26–March 18) in 2020. These are 16%, 25% and 19% sharper than the means of the previous five years in the same periods, respectively. Our study offers evidence of the environmental impact introduced by COVID-19, and insight into related economic influences.