Differences in leadership behaviour and influence between public and private organizations in Greece

This paper aims at comparing certain managerial aspects which seem to affect and account for the differences in organizational performance between public and private organizations in Greece.

By presenting empirical evidence concerning leadership behaviour and influence in both types of organizations, it becomes apparent that leadership quality is not necessarily the problem in public organizations. A number of leadership substitutes and neutralizers such as bureaucratic controls, external political influence and the limited positive reward power which leaders seem to possess have to be removed in order to enhance the role of leadership in public sector organizations.     

Leadership styles, need satisfaction and the organizational commitment of Greek managers

This article presents the results of an empirical study of the relation between the leadership styles, need satisfaction and the organizational commitment of Greek managers. The findings show that there is a negative relationship between need satisfaction and organizational commitment. This relationship is stronger for the higher-order than for the lower-order needs. Furthermore, the results provide some empirical evidence regarding the relationship between the superior's leadership style and the subordinate's organizational commitment. The findings show that in most cases studied, the commitment of the Greek managers was higher when the superior adopted a consultative leadership style. This style was also the one preferred by the majority of our respondents.     

Techno-economic evaluation of 3G and beyond mobile business alternatives

Three business case scenarios in the context of emerging mobile access network technologies and business players have been studied and the economical results are presented. The aim is to cover some of the most interesting business alternatives in providing the new 3G and beyond services including cases where the operator may have an existing second-generation cellular network or not, and a license for the 3G UMTS network or not. The scenarios have been analyzed in different Western European country groups that are not exactly representative of any defined country, but rather share typical demographic characteristics. Investments and operational expenditures are identified and the results show how diverse business models and technologies lead to different revenue, cost, and profitability profiles. The business case scenarios include incumbent’s 3G evolution with UMTS compared to an alternative 3G technology deployment with mobile WiMAX, new entrant’s UMTS deployment business case, and a greenfield CDMA450 deployment business case.     

Profit efficiency in the European Union banking industry: a directional technology distance function approach

We employ the directional technology distance function approach and present estimates of profit efficiency in the 25 European Union (EU) member states over the period 1998–2008. This method decomposes profit efficiency into its technical and allocative components. We investigate potential efficiency differences across the old EU region and the new EU member states, across countries and across banks of different size. Our results indicate a significant level of profit inefficiency for the EU region, which is predominantly attributed to allocative inefficiency. Our findings also suggest that banks operating in the old EU region are, on average, more profit efficient than credit institutions in the new EU member states. Overall, we observe considerable variation of efficiency scores across countries and different patterns in efficiency change over time, as well as a negative relationship between bank size and efficiency.     

Current account sustainability in the US: What did we really know about it?

We analyze the sustainability of the US current account (CA) deficit by means of unit-root tests. First, we argue that there are several reasons to believe that the CA may follow a non-linear mean-reversion behavior under the null of stationarity. Using a non-linear ESTAR model we can reject the null of non-stationarity favoring the sustainability hypothesis. Second, we ask whether unit-root tests are a useful indicator of sustainability by comparing in-sample results for the 1960–2004 period to the developments observed up to the end of 2008. We find that the non-linear model outperforms the linear and random walk models in terms of forecast performance. The large shocks to the CA observed in the last five years induced a faster speed of mean reversion, ensuring the necessary adjustment to meet the inter-temporal budget constraint.     

The option to expand to a next generation access network infrastructure and the role of regulation in a discrete time setting: A real options approach

Serious concerns have been raised, especially across Europe, about the role of regulation in network infrastructure investments. More specifically, the installation of optical fiber closer to customer premises, the so-called next generation access networks, requires massive investments in the face of demand and regulatory uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether specific regulatory scenarios (permanent regulation, regulatory forbearance, regulatory holidays and sunset clauses) alter the timing of the investment decision of an incumbent to expand to a new network infrastructure exploiting the binomial lattice approach from real options analysis.     

Asymmetric information and price competition in small business lending

This paper examines the relationship between bank lending rates and their cost of funds in New Zealand. Our results show that on average mortgage rates respond more quickly to changes in the cost of funds than base business lending rates. We also find an asymmetry in the initial (short-run) response of banks to changes in funding costs; in particular, our results show banks adjust mortgage rates downwards faster than upwards. The speed to which lending rates revert back to their equilibrium relationship with funding costs varies across the lending markets. We find the adjustment speed is faster when mortgage rates are below equilibrium, whereas it is slower when business lending rates are above long-run levels in relation to funding costs. Our analysis suggests that banks prefer the plain-vanilla type of lending such as mortgages in comparison to small business lending consistent with asymmetric information associated with business loans.     

Dynamic factor demands under imperfect competition: the Greek manufucturing industry 1958–1981

The intertemporal maximization problem of the firm under adjustment costs for its factors of production and imperfect competition in the output market is considered. The first-order conditions, with respect to capital and labour, the production function and the demand equation have been jointly estimated using Greek manufacturing data and values for the structural parameters have been obtained. The estimates are plausible and most of them significant. Tests of the overidentifying restirctions are unable to reject the overall specification of the model at conventional levels of significance.