零售企业规模无边界的理论与实证分析--以沃尔玛为例

企业规模理论在企业战略联盟及企业网络化环境下受到质疑，学术界提出了企业无边界理论．零售企业尤其是沃尔玛的快速扩张又提出了另一种无边界理论。这是两种不同性质的无边界理论。就单个企业的边界来说．生产企业和流通企业存在本质的区别．生产企业的资产专用性和技术跳跃所带来的沉没成本制约了生产企业的规模扩张．而流通企业的资产通用性和技术稳定性使流通企业避免了威廉姆森的企业“复制和有选择性控制的不可能性”命题的局限。本文通过沃尔玛的规模扩张的案例．建立影响企业规模因素的模型并进行实证分析．提出了零售企业规模无边界的命题。     

企业规模、规模经济与产业集群

企业规模问题一直存在着截然相反的观点和主张,造成冲突的原因在于“企业规模”是一个各取所需的含混的概念。具有经济学意义的企业规模应该从两个相互正交的维度上———企业的横向规模和纵向规模———来度量。规模经济来自于横向规模的扩张,而纵向规模的扩张可能会带来规模不经济。产业集群是观察企业横向、纵向规模一个好的样本。区分企业规模的不同性质,将会使与规模经济相关的理论研究出现明晰的路径。     

Corporate Governance and Expected Stock Returns: Evidence from Germany

Recent empirical work shows evidence for higher valuation of firms in countries with a better legal environment. We investigate whether differences in the quality of firm‐level corporate governance also help to explain firm performance in a cross‐section of companies within a single jurisdiction. Constructing a broad corporate governance rating (CGR) for German public firms, we document a positive relationship between governance practices and firm valuation. There is also evidence that expected stock returns are negatively correlated with firm‐level corporate governance, if dividend yields are used as proxies for the cost of capital. An investment strategy that bought high‐CGR firms and shorted low‐CGR firms earned abnormal returns of around 12% on an annual basis during the sample period.     

Zombie Board: Board Tenure and Firm Performance

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on‐the‐job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum level in the cross‐section are associated with negative (positive) announcement returns. The quality of corporate decisions also follows an inverted U‐shaped pattern in a sample of firms affected by the death of a director.     

Audit Firm Tenure and Audit Quality in a Constrained Market

We examine the relation between audit quality and audit firm tenure in the Iranian audit market, which is constrained by government policies that create intense competition for clients among many small audit firms. We develop arguments that these circumstances create cost pressures that entrench low audit quality and render auditors' plans more predictable to managers wishing to misstate their accounts. Using publicly available data for the audits of listed companies in Iran prior to mandatory audit firm rotation and the incidence of misstated financial reports identified by the Iranian Association of Certified Public Accountants Inspection Office, we find that the likelihood of a misstatement is lowest in the first two years of audit firm tenure. We also find that the likelihood of misstatement is not associated with the year preceding a mandatory audit firm rotation, suggesting outgoing auditor effort is not sensitive to the prospect of subsequent revelations of deficiencies. Although our results from a pre-mandatory rotation period show that frequent rotations appear to improve the financial reporting quality in our sample, we are wary of interpreting these results as support for the mandatory audit firm rotation policy in Iran. Rather, we suggest this is a peculiar consequence of deficiencies in audit quality inherent in the Iranian market.     

Board governance and corporate performance

We examine the link between the monitoring capacity of the board and corporate performance of UK listed firms. We also investigate how firms use the flexibility offered by the voluntary governance regime to make governance choices. We find a strong positive association between the board governance index we construct and firm operating performance. Our results imply that adherence to the board‐related recommendations of the UK Corporate Governance Code strengthens the board's monitoring capacity, potentially helping mitigate agency problems, but that investors do not value it correspondingly. Moreover, in contrast to prior UK findings suggesting efficient adoption of Code recommendations, we find that firms at times use the Code flexibility opportunistically, aiming to decrease the monitoring capacity of the board, which is followed by subsequent underperformance. This finding questions the effectiveness of the voluntary approach to governance regulation followed in the UK and in many countries around the world.     

Do monetary subjective well-being evaluations vary across space? Comparing continuous and discrete spatial heterogeneity

Using subjective well-being estimations, this study analyzes whether compensating variations vary across space using a cross-sectional data set from Chile. To achieve this goal, it describes and compares two econometric ways of modelling unobserved spatial heterogeneity. Both approaches allow compensating variations to vary across spatial units by assuming some distribution a priori. One method assumes that the spatial heterogeneity can be represented by a discrete distribution (a group of regions that share the same coefficient) and the other that the preferences can be represented by a continuous distribution (each region has a different coefficient). The results show that focusing just on the average estimates of compensating variations, as the applied studies have done so far, masks useful local variation. More empirical studies are needed to assess the advantages and disadvantages of both econometric approaches and how their results compare across a wide range of conditions and samples.     

Shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales in the valuation of the firm and its assets

This paper presents a simple framework for the valuation of compound options within shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales. The shadow cost includes two components. The first component is the product of pure information cost due to imperfect knowledge and heterogeneous expectations. The second component represents the additional cost caused by the short-selling constraint. Information costs are linked to Merton's (1987. Journal of Finance 42, 510) model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information, CAPMI. This model is extended by Wu et al. (1996. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 7, 136) who propose an incomplete-information capital market equilibrium with heterogeneous expectations and short sale restrictions, GCAPM. This model is used in our paper to provide for the first time in the literature analytic solutions for derivatives in the presence of both shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales.When deriving the compound call option formula, we consider a call option on a stock, which is itself an option on the assets of the firm. Our methodology incorporates shadow costs of incomplete information and short sales on the firm's assets as well as the effects of leverage in the capital structure. The formula can be useful in the valuation of several corporate liabilities in the presence of information uncertainty and short sales constraints about the firm and its cash flows. Our analysis can be used for the valuation of several real options.     

Overcoming localization of knowledge — the role of professional service firms

The literature on organizational learning asserts that external learning is often limited geographically and technologically. We scrutinize to what extent organizations acquire external knowledge by accessing external knowledge repositories. We argue that professional service firms (PSFs) grant access to nonlocalized knowledge repositories and thereby not only facilitate external learning but also help to overcome localization. Focusing on patent law firms, we test our predictions using a unique dataset of 544,820 pairs of European patent applications. Analyzing patterns of knowledge flows captured in patent citations, we find that accessing a PSF's repository facilitates the acquisition of external knowledge. As the effect is more pronounced for knowledge that is distant to a focal organization, we conclude that having access to a knowledge repository compensates for localization disadvantages. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of privatization on efficiency and profitability

Over the past three decades, China has undergone tremendous economic and social change as a consequence of the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. This paper examines a key feature of this transition – the privatization of the state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) – through both a theoretical model and empirical analysis. Using newly collected primary data from a variety of sources, we study how privatization of listed SOEs affects employment, wages, profits and other aspects of economic performance at the firm level. Our major finding is that privatization results in substantial downsizing of employment, increased labour productivity and rising profitability.