Why mentoring matters in a hypercompetitive world

Professional service firms (PSFs), like so many other companies, are juggling the modern challenges of global competition, increased regulation, and rapid employee turnover. In a people-oriented industry, attrition has special import. DeLong and Gabarro, of Harvard Business School, along with former Morgan Stanley and Ernst & Young executive Lees, argue that a PSF can gain a much-needed competitive edge by renewing its focus on mentoring. The authors' in-depth interviews with professionals from more than 30 PSFs have yielded four principles for firms to heed as they rediscover this lost art. First, mentoring is personal. Rather than relying on standardized programs, mentors must frequently--and fairly--provide authentic advice and nurturing. Partners at PSFs know how to use their ample people skills effectively with clients; the benefits of using them with junior colleagues are even greater. Second, not everyone is an A player. A small dose of attention given to a B player goes at least as far as a large one offered to an A player. Since B players constitute about 70% of PSF staff, that's time well spent. Third, choice assignments are in short supply, which limits the number of learning opportunities available for associates. Good alternatives include shadowing senior professionals on assignments and taking on research or other projects that are not client-related but that nonetheless build expertise. Finally, mentoring is a two-way street. Protégés should not only learn from their senior counterparts, but also be taught to attract mentors--and to co-mentor one another.     

一桩合作投资争议案发生之后

在合作、合资经营中,保存业务交往中的证据材料是十分重要的,否则一旦出现纠纷,纵使占理,也会眼睁睁的看着自己吃亏。在本文中仲裁专家的冷分析能否让吃一堑者长一智呢     

一场贷款协议争议案仲裁始末

申请人（原称“申诉人”)：中国A银行、A银行日本B分行、日本C银行(原名日本D银行)、日本E银行香港分行和日本F银行被申请人(原称“被诉人”)：中国G饭店有限公司1987年3月20日上述双方签订的50亿日元贷款协议和同日签订的Assignment Agreement中的仲裁条款申请人按照贷款协议的规定,履行了全部放款义务,被申请人提取了全部贷款。后来,由于被申请人无力按时偿还到期贷款本息,双方就履行“Assignment Agreement”又产生争议,协商不成,申请人向中国贸仲提出申请。     

The truth about interest rate futures and forwards: Evidence from high frequency data

This paper examines the pricing of Eurodollar futures and US dollar FRA contracts using a high frequency data set. I find the median futures/FRA differential is close to zero and the dispersion of the differential smaller than reported in prior studies using low frequency data and implied forward rates as proxies for forward rates. Arbitrage opportunities are linked to the presence of stale FRA quotes and the oscillatory behavior of FRA quotes. Inter-market information flows are found to be of much shorter duration than previously reported with the futures market playing the dominant role in the information transmission process in the shorter-dated maturities.     

私募真相

一直以来,相对于“私人理财”的热闹,“企业理财”市场则略显沉闷。有业内人士介绍,造成这种局面一方面由于很多企业抱着“多一事不如少一事”的态度,使得相当一部分企业的闲置资金趴在账户上“睡觉”;而另一方面,目前公司理财的产品多是以固定收益类产品为主,投资回报与定期存款相差不大,波澜不惊的业绩回报让企业没有太强投资冲动。     

Distance still matters. The hard reality of global expansion

Companies routinely overestimate the attractiveness of foreign markets. Dazzled by the sheer size of untapped markets, they lose sight of the difficulties of pioneering new, often very different territories. The problem is rooted in the analytic tools (the most prominent being country portfolio analysis, or CPA) that managers use to judge international investments. By focusing on national wealth, consumer income, and people's propensity to consume, CPA emphasizes potential sales, ignoring the costs and risks of doing business in a new market. Most of these costs and risks result from the barriers created by distance. "Distance," however, does not refer only to geography; its other dimensions can make foreign markets considerably more or less attractive. The CAGE framework of distance presented here considers four attributes: cultural distance (religious beliefs, race, social norms, and language that are different for the target country and the country of the company considering expansion); administrative or political distance (colony-colonizer links, common currency, and trade arrangements); geographic distance (the physical distance between the two countries, the size of the target country, access to waterways and the ocean, internal topography, and transportation and communications infrastructures); and economic distance (disparities in the two countries' wealth or consumer income and variations in the cost and quality of financial and other resources). This framework can help to identify the ways in which potential markets may be distant from existing ones. The article explores how (and by how much) various types of distance can affect different types of industries and shows how dramatically an explicit consideration of distance can change a company's picture of its strategic options.     

The Maturity Rat Race

Why do some firms, especially financial institutions, finance themselves so short‐term? We show that extreme reliance on short‐term financing may be the outcome of a maturity rat race: a borrower may have an incentive to shorten the maturity of an individual creditor's debt contract because this dilutes other creditors. In response, other creditors opt for shorter maturity contracts as well. This dynamic toward short maturities is present whenever interim information is mostly about the probability of default rather than the recovery in default. For borrowers that cannot commit to a maturity structure, equilibrium financing is inefficiently short‐term.     

风险投资的十个真相

优秀的VC并不是永远都不会错过好项目、不投资坏项目,也不可能做到,但是．即便是成功的VC都会看走眼、放过好项目。这只是关于风险投资真相之一,还是其他种种真相．对此,创业者要有所了解     

IT服务的关键时刻

人的一生会经历许许多多的事情。随着时间的流逝,绝大多数的事情都已经忘记,怎么也记不起来了。但总有那么一些事情深深的嵌在脑海里,经常想起、与人谈起、难以忘怀……那是什么原因让你这样呢？我把这些事情看作人生的关键时刻。     

投融资是块肥肉，好看不好吃

实力、能力、精力是投融资转型最简单的判断标准。实力是指愿意投入起码的小钱撬动投融资大平台;能力是指愿意提升自己和团队的投融资专业技能;精力是指愿意投入人员和时间搭建投融资平台     

历史的真实与史家的责任

中国人历来十分在意历史对现实的影响,其实许多其他国家的民族也是如此。比如,英国人就非常避讳谈论1840年发生在中国沿海的那场战争,在英国人的历史教科书上仅仅轻描淡写地说是因为“贸易摩擦而产生的冲突”。可是让人不明白的是,中国人就没有像计较日本人的同样伎俩那样对英国人提出交涉,这可能是因为时间久远的缘故,要不就是因为我们是那场战争中的完全失败的一方,避免触摸自     

科技创造价值是硬道理

改革开放初期,邓小平有一句话高度概括了科技的价值,就是“科技是第一生产力”,把这句名言放到如今中国经济的转型之中,就是谁在科技上有所发明、有所创造、有所创新,谁就创造了投资价值、创造了就业;谁抢占了科技的制高点,谁就掌握了未来的经济增长点。那么,当今科技发展最为引人关注的有哪些亮点？像硅谷这样的创新区为什么会有创造力？请看本栏目文章《实验精神与专利共享促成硅谷》、《人工智能为什么会强大》和《AR/VR的进阶之路》。     

The value-added tax and growth: design matters

Previous research has shown that changes in the composition of tax revenue affect long-run growth. However, little is yet known about whether the way tax revenue is raised matters for growth. This paper examines whether, in the context of OECD countries, a revenue-neutral increase in the value-added tax (VAT), offset by a fall in income taxes, may have different effects on long-run growth depending on how the VAT is raised. We show that a revenue-neutral rise in the VAT promotes growth when it is raised through a rise in C-efficiency, while it does not when it is raised through a rise in the standard VAT rate, the rate applied to the largest portion of taxed consumption. C-efficiency measures the departure of the VAT from a perfectly enforced tax levied at a single rate on all consumption, which in advanced economies is largely due to the VAT that is not levied because of exemptions and reduced rates. Thus, our results suggest that an increase in C-efficiency, possibly reflecting the broadening of the VAT base through fewer exemptions and a more uniform rate structure with fewer reduced rates, promotes growth more than a rise in the standard rate.

     

周炜 做VC需慢工出细活儿

对于KPCB的合伙人周炜来说,选择做VC的生活,注定不轻松。不过,虽然过程经常与风险与困难相伴,但收获同样颇多。     

The workplace politics of U.S. accounting: Race,class and gender discrimination at Baruch College

There are significant differences between the U.S. and European academic workplaces (and therefore the way struggles against class and race discrimination are waged) however there are also important commonalities and convergences. This shared experience may be accentuated in the U.K. as a post-research assessment exercise (RAE) era approaches. This paper offers an account of U.S. workplace politics at a macro and micro level. We introduce our paper through a macro approach providing context for our analysis via a brief overview of a progressive research journal assessment exercise, designed to assist critical accounting faculty in promotion, tenure, hiring, and firing struggles. We then report our findings from our survey of progressive academics’ views on journal assessment and the implications of for higher education staff and students and potential students alike. Through our micro focus we present an in-house expose of the anatomy of discriminatory practices at the largest accountancy department, and the largest business, in the U.S.: Baruch College at the City University of New York (CUNY). There are specificities that are unique to the U.S. (and even between Baruch and other U.S. schools) however these differences should not be overstated. Nor should we minimize the possibility of distilling some broad lessons: the systematic subordination of education and research to capital accumulation processes and market pressures that evoke similarities that span academic workplaces across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australasia.     

Gender matters most. The impact on short‐term risk aversion following a financial crash

This paper examines how investors in an emerging market react to a domestic financial crisis. We conjecture that risk aversion increases following such events and that the effect is more pronounced among specific groups of investors. Our study makes use of a unique dataset of mutual fund investors from one of Colombia's largest stock brokers. Our results reveal that women and self‐employed individuals make the largest withdrawals from risky funds after financial crises.     

Size matters: The impact of financial liberalization on individual firms

We attempt to answer the following questions: What are the revaluation effects and the impact on performance, volatility, and return correlation from stock market liberalization in emerging markets? These questions have been studied extensively at the market level but not at the firm level. Our results show significantly different impact of stock market liberalization across firms. Large firms tend to exhibit large revaluation effects, insignificant change in performance, large declines in volatility, and insignificant change in correlation from liberalization. Small firms show small revaluation effects, improved performance, smaller decline in volatility and decreases in correlation after liberalization.     

The association of formal and informal public accounting mentoring with role stress and related job outcomes

This paper examines the association between mentoring (both formal and informal) and three measures of role stress (role conflict, role ambiguity, and perceived environmental uncertainty), as well as two job outcomes (job performance and turnover intentions). The statistical analysis is based on structural equation modeling, using responses from 794 employees of large public accounting organizations. The results suggest that in addition to providing the traditional career development and psychosocial support functions, informal mentors provide protégés with information that clarifies their organizational role (reduces role ambiguity). However, mentoring benefits may come at a cost: higher role conflict. The study found limited positive effects attributed to formally assigned mentors.     

Neighborhood matters: The impact of location on broad based stock option plans

We find that fixed effects related to the location of firms’ headquarters explain variation in broad based option grants after controlling for industry effects and firm characteristics traditionally known to affect option granting. Location matters because of local labor market conditions and social interaction with neighboring firms. Broad based option grants are higher: (i) when a firm's stock prices co-move more with stock prices of other firms located in that Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA); (ii) in states that are less likely to enforce non-compete agreements; and (iii) in MSAs where employees prefer options because stocks there experience abnormally high returns.     

The second moment matters! Cross-sectional dispersion of firm valuations and expected returns

Behavioral theories predict that firm valuation dispersion in the cross-section (“dispersion”) measures aggregate overpricing caused by investor overconfidence and should be negatively related to expected aggregate returns. This paper develops and tests these hypotheses. Consistent with the model predictions, I find that measures of dispersion are positively related to aggregate valuations, trading volume, idiosyncratic volatility, past market returns, and current and future investor sentiment indexes. Dispersion is a strong negative predictor of subsequent short- and long-term market excess returns. Market beta is positively related to stock returns when the beginning-of-period dispersion is low and this relationship reverses when initial dispersion is high. A simple forecast model based on dispersion significantly outperforms a naive model based on historical equity premium in out-of-sample tests and the predictability is stronger in economic downturns.