Purpose: State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have a growing importance in the economic and social life of both developed and developing countries, being present in their key sectors such as telecommunication, electricity, transportation. The purpose of this paper is to offer a comprehensive review of the up to date literature on the relation between State Ownership and Earnings management.Design/methodology/approach: An examination of the literature was undertaken to review the quantitative studies that analyze the existence or the non-existence of a relation between State Ownership and Earnings management, comparing population and data set used, methodology applied and result achieved. To find studies relevant to the issue, we utilized Google Scholar and delimited the research to 20 top Scholarly Journals, over the interval 1996-2016.Findings: The available literature seems to offer contrasting viewpoints regarding the relationship between public ownership and earnings management, even though studies generally show a slight prevalence towards a negative relationship. This means that the quality of the earnings published in the budgets of public owned enterprises must be slightly higher than the earnings published by private companies.Research limitations/implications: Almost all studies reviewed present limitations that hinder the assumption of general rules regarding the obtained results. At the same time, the different studies do not always use the same system to measure earnings management activities.Practical implications: The paper might offer interesting implications for central and local governments, in order to influence the decisions on their intervention in the market.Originality/value: To our knowledge, this is the first study trying to attempt this emerging goal.
PurposeWith the aim to enrich the ongoing debate about healthcare management, the paper has a twofold intent: [1] to emphasise the interpretative contribution that intellectual capital can provide to a better understanding of the relevant role of patients in the healthcare sector and [2] to investigate the relationships between the three main dimensions of intellectual capital – human capital, relational capital and structural capital – and patient satisfaction in the healthcare sector.Design/methodology/approachThe intellectual capital framework is contextualised in the healthcare sector, and the relationships among patient evaluations of human capital, relational capital and structural capital and patient satisfaction are tested via structural equation modelling (SEM) using primary data collected with reference to a sample of 561 Italian patients involved in post survey treatments in three Italian hospitals.FindingsThe role of intellectual capital in supporting a better understanding of processes and dynamics of patient satisfaction in the healthcare sector is underlined. The empirical research provides possible guidelines for recovery patients centrality in healthcare management.Originality/valueThe paper shows how an intellectual capital framework can support a better understanding and management of dynamics and processes through which patient centrality and satisfaction in healthcare management can be enforced.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.