The Road to Sustainability: Exploring the Process of Corporate Environmental Strategy Over Time

We explore corporate environmental strategy over time, investigating the patterns of evolving environmental investment decisions. Longitudinal case studies provide evidence that environmental strategy evolves through a feedback process, wherein outcomes of earlier decisions have an impact on subsequent decisions. Specifically, positive feedback from outcomes like innovation triggers higher goals, enhancing the undertaking of advanced investments, whereas negative feedback from outcomes, such as increased costs, decelerates the adoption of further investments. The study points to an emergent view of environmental strategy, where capabilities that are gradually developed in concomitance with environmental outcomes lead to an upgrading of environmental goals, thus triggering the feedback process. The process eventually culminates in higher levels of environmental conduct, being more and more integrated with business strategy and competitive advantage. Managers' values and environmental attitudes influence environmental decisions and actions, affecting the acceleration of the feedback process and the magnitude of responses. Managerial implications are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Knowledge Spillovers,Competition and Innovation Success

We study the relationship between a patent-based measure of knowledge spillovers that calculates technological proximity based on technologically relevant firms and innovation success. We find – for a representative sample of Swiss firms – that knowledge spillovers have a positive and significant association with the commercial success of innovative products. The paper shows the importance of market conditions for the relationship of spillovers with innovation performance: It is only positive and significant in markets with a medium number of competitors in the main product market, but not in monopolistic or polypolistic market structures.     

Speculative trade and the value of public information

In environments with expected utility, it has long been established that speculative trade cannot occur and that the value of public information is negative in economies with risk-sharing and no aggregate uncertainty. We show that these results are still true even if we relax expected utility, so that either Dynamic Consistency (DC) or Consequentialism is violated. We characterize no speculative trade in terms of a weakening of DC and find that Consequentialism is not required. Moreover, we show that a weakening of both DC and Consequentialism is sufficient for the value of public information to be negative. We therefore generalize these important results for convex preferences which contain several classes of ambiguity averse preferences.     

金砖四国货币存在风险国际收支决定脆弱程度

【摩根士丹利9月29日】从2005～2006年到2007～2008年，新兴市场的私人资本净流入额从5500亿美元／年左右猛增至7500亿美元／年左右。2007年，私人资本净流入已达到新兴市场资本接受国GDP的6％，从而超过了1997年亚洲货币危机前夜的水平。然而，就2009年而言，鉴于全球经济增长速度与资本流动之间的关系，全球经济减速有可能导致新兴市场的资本流入大幅下滑，从而回落到5500亿美元左右。面对这种风险，不同新兴市场经济体的脆弱程度存在差异，     

“奥运魔咒”不足为虑，“增长恐慌”将冲击亚洲货币

【摩根士丹利8月25日】2月份我们曾论证说，中国将打破“奥运魔咒”（Olympic Curse）。虽然我们仍然坚持此观点，但另一方面也认为，奥运会后，中国存在出现“增长恐慌”（growth scare）的风险。即使这次经济减速非常和缓，也很有可能加重投资者的不安，从而对亚洲市场产生明显影响。鉴于此，我们对日本之外亚洲（AXJ）货币的态度更加悲观。     

The impact of venture capital on the persistence of innovation activities of start-ups

In this study we investigate the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation activities of start-ups. This is done based on a cohort of start-ups that is representative of all firms founded in Switzerland in 1996/97, as recorded by a census of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for this period. We analyze not only the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation performance 3 years after firm foundation, but also 6 and 9 years after firm start, respectively, for those firms that survived and reported continuously innovation activities (persistence of innovation). The results support neither the hypothesis of a positive impact on initial innovation activities nor the hypothesis of a positive time-persistent effect on innovation performance of start-ups.     

How Swiss small and medium-sized firms assess the performance impact of mergers and acquisitions

While previous studies on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) mostly relied on large firms, our study is based on a sample that includes all Swiss M&As that took place in the period 2006–2008, mostly of which have been SMEs. We investigate the firm characteristics that determine the innovation and economic performance of M&As. The performance measures are based on firms’ assessments. These measures are regressed on a series of possible determining factors as postulated in existing theoretical and empirical literature. M&A performance is primarily affected by specific M&A characteristics, but not by general market characteristics such as demand development or competition conditions. Rather astonishingly, it is also not affected by firm characteristics such as capital intensity, human capital endowment and firm size. There is an interesting exception: innovation activities. This means that, with the remarkable exception of innovation activities, the level of M&A performance is determined primarily by factors of the M&A process itself.     

Value at risk models for volatile emerging markets equity portfolios

This paper investigates the issue of market risk quantification for emerging and developed market equity portfolios. A very wide spectrum of popular and widely used in practice Value at Risk (VaR) models are evaluated and compared with Extreme Value Theory (EVT) and adaptive filtered models, during normal, crises, and post-crises periods. The results are interesting and indicate that despite the documented differences between emerging and developed markets, the most successful VaR models are common for both asset classes. Furthermore, in the case of the (fatter tailed) emerging market equity portfolios, most VaR models turn out to yield conservative risk forecasts, in contrast to developed market equity portfolios, where most models underestimate the realized VaR. VaR estimation during periods of financial turmoil seems to be a difficult task, particularly in the case of emerging markets and especially for the higher loss quantiles. VaR models seem to be affected less by crises periods in the case of developed markets. The performance of the parametric (non-parametric) VaR models improves (deteriorates) during post-crises periods due to the inclusion of extreme events in the estimation sample.     

An examination into the causal logic of rent generation: contrasting Porter's competitive strategy framework and the resource‐based perspective

In this study we revisit some fundamental questions that are increasingly at the heart of current strategic management discourse regarding the relative impact of industry and firm‐specific factors on sustainable competitive advantage. We explore this issue by referring to respective assertions of two major perspectives that dominate the literature over the last two decades: the Porter framework of competitive strategy and the more recent resource‐based view of the firm. A composite model is proposed which elaborates upon both perspectives' divergent causal logic with respect to the conditions relevant for firm success. Empirical findings suggest that industry and firm specific effects are both important but explain different dimensions of performance. Where industry forces influence market performance and profitability, firm assets act upon accomplishments in the market arena (i.e., market performance), and via the latter, to profitability. The paper concludes with directions for future research that will seek to integrate both content and process aspects of firm behavior. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.