Building capabilities to manage strategic alliances

Recently, academics have attributed a large part of alliance success to a firm's ability to successfully manage its alliances, also called its level of alliance management capability. We contribute to this growing body of literature by (1) verifying the impact of alliance management capability on alliance performance and (2) analyzing the drivers of alliance management capability. We measure this capability through four types of alliance learning processes and study how each of these processes affects alliance outcome. Furthermore, we take into account several possible drivers of alliance management capability such as organizational culture, commitment of the top team, alliance experience and the alliance function. We refine the results by examining how these factors affect each of the four learning processes underpinning alliance management capability. Our research model will be tested on a sample of 189 Belgian companies using PLS. We find that the commitment of the top management team is the most critical factor in explaining success with alliances.     

CFOs versus CEOs: Equity incentives and crashes

Using a large sample of U.S. firms for the period 1993-2009, we provide evidence that the sensitivity of a chief financial officer's (CFO) option portfolio value to stock price is significantly and positively related to the firm's future stock price crash risk. In contrast, we find only weak evidence of the positive impact of chief executive officer option sensitivity on crash risk. Finally, we find that the link between CFO option sensitivity and crash risk is more pronounced for firms in non-competitive industries and those with a high level of financial leverage.     

IFRS and the regulatory environment: The case of U.S. investor allocation choice

This paper investigates whether a country’s use of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) is associated with increased US investment in foreign equities. The recent global trend towards the use of IFRS may signal attempts by policy makers to reduce information asymmetries for international investors. However, a concern is that these standards must be accompanied by a stronger regulatory environment in order for them to gain legitimacy. Investor allocation choice is based on US holdings of foreign equities and the regulatory environment is interpreted using two distinct factors: the legal standards system and the enforcement regime. We document that US investment is associated with IFRS only when it is combined with a strong regulatory environment, specifically a strong enforcement regime. We also find that mandating IFRS is attractive to US investors only when combined with a strong regulatory environment.     

Stock return predictability and the adaptive markets hypothesis: Evidence from century-long U.S. data

This paper provides strong evidence of time-varying return predictability of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index from 1900 to 2009. Return predictability is found to be driven by changing market conditions, consistent with the implication of the adaptive markets hypothesis. During market crashes, no statistically significant return predictability is observed, but return predictability is associated with a high degree of uncertainty. In times of economic or political crises, stock returns have been highly predictable with a moderate degree of uncertainty in predictability. We find that return predictability has been smaller during economic bubbles than in normal times. We also find evidence that return predictability is associated with stock market volatility and economic fundamentals.     

Tick size,market structure,and market quality

Large tick sizes imposed on high-priced stocks on the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE) are significant binding constraints on bid-ask spreads. Nearly 60% of quoted spreads are equal to the tick size for stocks with the largest tick size and more than 87% of quoted spreads are equal to the tick size for stocks in the largest size portfolio. We also show that the average spread of KSE stocks with large tick sizes is greater than that of matched NYSE stocks, whereas the average spread of KSE stocks with the smallest tick size is smaller than the corresponding figure for the matched NYSE stocks. We interpret these results as evidence that traders on the KSE are paying large trading costs because of the artificially imposed large tick sizes.     

Solving the multi-country Real Business Cycle model using a perturbation method

This paper solves the multi-country RBC model described in den Haan et al. (this issue) and Juillard and Villemot (this issue), using a perturbation method. We explain how to apply first- and second-order versions of the gensys2.m algorithm to this model. The perturbation method is computationally cheap and can easily be applied to large models with possibly hundreds of state variables.     

Spatial Correlation in Household Choices in Rural Indonesia*

Many household choices in developing economies are correlated with choices of nearby households, because nearby locations have unobserved factors in common and households and their neighbors interact. However, models recognizing these spatial correlations are rarely used because few surveys give exact household locations. In the present paper, we use unusual data from rural Indonesia, where distances between households can be measured, to examine spatial effects in equations for non‐farm enterprises' share of household incomes and food's share of total household budgets. Our results indicate that ignoring spatial correlations in household choices might cause bias and inferential errors and could distort recommended policy interventions aiming to raise living standards in rural Asia.     

Inter-regional endogenous growth under the impacts of demographic changes

This article attempts to project the economic paths for the individual Midwest states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as the rest of the US) in the near future when the population ageing becomes more pronounced. To accomplish this task, a dynamic general equilibrium model is developed so that it could incorporate the inter-regional transactions and endogenous growth mechanisms within the framework of an Overlapping Generations (OLG) model. Key parameter values associated with the regional interconnections were assigned using a multi-regional Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) of the Midwest states. Two different steady-state results were presented with two different age-cohort population structures corresponding to year 2007 and 2030. These steady-state results imply that the rate of declining of per-capita output is projected to be heterogeneous across the regions due to different developments of age-cohort population structures and consequently different levels of endogenously determined educational investment of workers. Also, two steady-state simulation results revealed that the development of output price in a certain region reflects the dynamics of demographics of every region. Meanwhile, the dynamic simulation results reveal that the per-capita output of every region is projected to grow positively in the near future when the population ageing will be pronounced. However, the growth rate of the per-capita output is projected to be heterogeneous across the regions: the regions with high-skilled workers hold the potential threat that population ageing could give more negative impacts on the economy due to the relatively sluggish growth of human capital stock. Also, the dynamic simulation results show that certain regions in the Midwest will experience their terms of trade deterioration in the near future, implying that careful attention should be given to their future trade conditions.     

The effect of strategic alliances on firm productivity in South Korea

Using a rich firm-level data set from South Korea, this article analyses the impact of strategic alliances on firm performance, focusing on how firm productivity is affected by alliance types such as joint venture, joint technical development, technical alliance, joint marketing and coproduction as well as alliance structures such as intra- and inter-industry alliances. Total factor productivity (TFP) is estimated through the semi-parametric method suggested by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003). In addition, a two-stage least-squares (2SLS) method is applied to reduce the potential endogenous problem between productivity and strategic alliance choices. The empirical results found in this article indicate that the engagement in joint ventures positively affects firm productivity and that the formation of international intra-industry alliances has a positive impact on firm productivity.     

The dependence structure of income distribution

This article investigates the dependence structure of income distribution in the US by providing two approaches – one regression-based and the other copula-based – to reveal new information about income dependence. The system of Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) is estimated for both quintile income shares and mean income growth by controlling for macroeconomic variables, and Kendall's tau statistics are derived for income dependence. Results from less restrictive copula models corroborate the regression-based results. However, income growth models do not support the common claim that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Income dependence patterns do not appear to be affected by business cycles, but Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have drastically different income dependence results.