Who goes, who stays?

The merger announcement between DeWaal Pharmaceuticals and BioHealth Labs was front-page news. Pictures of CEO Steve Lindell and chairman Kaspar van de Velde had appeared in newspapers around the world. Two months later, the press had moved on to a new story, and the hard labor of integration loomed. Steve had worked tirelessly to clear regulatory hurdles, and all signs pointed toward approval in the near future. Now Steve was feeling pressure to attack the real challenge of the merger: bringing together two very different cultures as quickly and efficiently as possible. DeWaal was an established drug-maker based in the Netherlands, and BioHealth, headquartered just north of New York City, had in recent years become competitive at the highest tier of the market. The first step in integrating the two companies was to select the top layers of management for the new company. At the moment, there were some 120 people on two continents for about 65 senior-level jobs. Steve's urgency was not without cause: talented people from both sides were jumping ship, and BioHealth's stock price had dipped 20% after the initial euphoria over the deal had worn off. Complicating matters was confusion over who was really in charge: Steve wanted to take leadership and move ahead rapidly, but he was often disarmed by Kaspar's charming persuasiveness. As the two men attempt to work through the important personnel issues during a lunch meeting, they quickly hit a roadblock. How can they come to agreement about who goes and who stays? Four commentators offer advice in response to this fictional case.     

Which firms engage small, foreign, or state banks? And who goes Islamic? Evidence from Turkey

We study a representative dataset from Turkey that identifies firm–bank connections. Banks in Turkey differ not only in size and nationality, but also in ownership and orientation (non-Islamic versus Islamic)—resulting in at least six distinct bank types. We estimate a multinomial logit of the choice by the firm of bank type. We document a strong correspondence between bank type and firm characteristics that is not always the same as has been documented so far for US datasets. For example, small firms engage large rather than small banks. Young, large, multiple-bank, and industry-diversified firms, that are located in or close to Istanbul, team up with foreign banks. Islamic banks mainly deal with young, multiple-bank, industry-focused and transparent firms.     

Value-driven health care--pipe dream, placebo or prescription for excellence?

The Value-Driven Health Care initiative and the Executive Order (EO) that underpins it invert the cost/quality equation and proceed from the premise that improving quality first--in terms of both care and system management--will reduce costs and elevate value. Equally essential to the success of the initiative is transparency: access to information that will empower consumers to save on quality care. This article describes the four cornerstones of the EO and explains how they will translate into corporate action and value.     

Fundamental and technical analysis: substitutes or complements?

Although the fundamental and technical analysis literatures invest considerable effort in assessing their respective ability to explain share prices, they invariably do so without reference to each other. In this context, we propose an equity valuation model integrating both fundamental and technical analysis and, in doing so, recognize their potential as complements rather than as substitutes. Testing confirms the complementary nature of fundamental and technical analysis by showing that, although each performs well in isolation, models integrating both have superior explanatory power. While our findings relate to the valuation of shares, they also have implications for other valuation exercises.     

Does it matter who pays for bond ratings? Historical evidence

We test whether Standard and Poor's (S&P) assigns higher bond ratings after it switches from investor-pay to issuer-pay fees in 1974. Using Moody's rating for the same bond as a benchmark, we find that when S&P charges investors and Moody's charges issuers, S&P's ratings are lower than Moody's. Once S&P adopts issuer-pay, its ratings increase and no longer differ from Moody's. More importantly, S&P only assigns higher ratings for bonds that are subject to greater conflicts of interest, measured by higher expected rating fees or lower credit quality. These findings suggest that the issuer-pay model leads to higher ratings.     

红肉,吃or不吃?

随着物质生活水平的提高,我国居民肉类食品摄入量逐年增高,已经成为人们日常膳食的重要组成部分。但自从世界卫生组织下属国际癌症研究组织(IARC)在2015年12月宣布将红肉列为"致癌可能性较高"的食物之后,不仅舆论哗然,众多食肉爱好者们也感到迷惘不安,难道无肉不欢的朋友们,真的要与红肉"绝缘"?难道热闹红火的年夜饭餐桌上真的要全是素食?红肉会致癌?所谓红肉,通常是红色肌肉纤维比白色肌肉纤     

Ethical Profit: An Agenda for Consolidation or for Radical Change?

The article considers that conceptual frameworks exist not to portray truth as an absolute, but rather to provide order and guidance to actions and behavior. From such perspective, the article considers that ethical frameworks assist in our attempt to balance the instinct that we have to look out for our own individual welfare with the conscience of obligation that we have to care for a wider community. In this light, the development of ethical frameworks may be interpreted in terms of a process of natural selection with regard to the mutual interdependence of the individual and the community. Thereby, the article argues that corporate and financial ethics do not exist ``to do good'', but rather to act reflexively to *I$Lconsolidate$L and *I$Lsanction$L internal activity, with the consequence that the employee is called on to be ethical not on the individual's own terms, but on the profit- motivated terms of the institution. The net outcome is that institutionalized activity may be co-ordinated to function under the banner of ethical codes of practice, while broader ethical issues for the institution as a whole remain suppressed. We illustrate these arguments with reference to the financial ethics of the Grameen Bank of Professor Muhammad Yunus. Notwithstanding, the example holds out the possibility that ethical concerns for the whole of society might ultimately be compatible with the profit motives of our institutionalised society.     

电子商务,征税or不征税?

正今年"双十一"天猫疯狂购物节在24小时内销售额达到571亿元,人们在又一次感叹电子商务急速发展以外,不得不对其一直以来被探讨的另一个话题重新展开热烈讨论——电子商务,究竟该不该征税?一、电子商务征税存在的问题全国政协委员、苏宁云商董事长张近东曾指出,我国当下电商交易的90%是以C2C的形式从事B2C的交易,约一半交易量游离于法律监管之外,进而导致假冒产品充斥、侵权现象严重同时,非注册经营、     

Better directors or distracted directors? An international analysis of busy boards

This study examines the effect of busy directors and boards on the value of a set of non-U.S. firms from 1999 to 2012. We find that busy directors and boards are a global phenomenon, but that national culture helps to explain the cross-sectional variation in director and board busyness. Firms with busy boards exhibit lower market-to-book ratios and reduced profitability, but this effect is reversed for younger firms. We conclude that the advising ability of these networked directors is most useful for younger firms. A demographic analysis shows that multiple directorships are positively associated with firm performance and education, but negatively associated with female directors.     

Socially responsible investing: Is it for real or just for show?

Many mutual funds declare themselves as socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. However, it is unclear whether this rhetoric is simply window-dressing to attract capital inflows or reflects genuine concern. We show that companies with better environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance are more attractive to SRI mutual funds. More importantly, SRI mutual funds positively affect their investee firms' ESG performance after controlling for firm characteristics, possible endogeneity issues, and omitted variables. Furthermore, ownership structure, board members' international experience, and social media attention are important channels through which SRI mutual funds influence their investee firms' ESG performance.     

An analysis of commodity markets: What gain for investors?

In this paper we study whether the commodity futures market predicts the commodity spot market. Using historical daily data on four commodities—oil, gold, platinum, and silver—we find that they do. We then show how investors can use this information on the futures market to devise trading strategies and make profits. In particular, dynamic trading strategies based on a mean–variance investor framework produce somewhat different results compared with those based on technical trading rules. Dynamic trading strategies suggest that all commodities are profitable and profits are dependent on structural breaks. The most recent global financial crisis marked a period in which commodity profits were the weakest.     

Does corporate diversification exacerbate or mitigate earnings management?: An empirical analysis

The purpose of this study is to determine whether earning management is exacerbated or alleviated in diversified firms. An explicit distinction is made between industrial and geographic diversification. The empirical evidence shows that earnings management is mitigated by 1.8% in industrially diversified firms. The evidence also shows that a combination of industrial and global diversification helps alleviate earnings management by 2.5%. Global diversification alone, however, does not appear to impact earnings management. We argue that diversified firms derive their cash flows from disparate business divisions. The accruals generated by these business divisions are imperfectly correlated and, hence, tend to offset each other at the entire firm's level, making it difficult for managers to manage earnings considerably in either direction. Finally, our results show that diversified firms do not suffer more severe informational asymmetry, which may explain why earnings management does not occur to a greater extent in diversified firms.     

Push or pull? Performance-pay,incentives, and information

We study a principal-agent model wherein the agent is better informed of the prospects of the project, and the project requires both an observable and unobservable input. We characterize the optimal contracts, and explore the trade-offs between high- and low-powered incentive schemes. We discuss the implications for push and pull programs used to encourage Research and Development (R&D) activity, but our results are relevant in other contexts.     

Speculation or currency? Multi-scale analysis of cryptocurrencies—The case of Bitcoin

This paper proposes a novel two-stage VMD-based multi-scale regression to analyze various cryptocurrency attributes that are still unclear in the existing literature. In the first stage, Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) is used to decompose the cryptocurrency prices into low, medium and high frequency modes with different attributes. In the second stage, the VMD-based multi-scale regression is proposed for these modes with selected explanatory variables. Using the proposed framework, we focus on analyzing the multiple attributes of daily Bitcoin price data as a case study. Empirical results indicate that the low-frequency mode has specific currency or long-term investment characteristics, unlike the short/medium-term investment attributes for the medium-frequency mode, while the high-frequency mode represents some speculation. Some events merely affect a single frequency mode, but others impact all frequency modes. The results of events analysis based on VMD could enhance the identification of the multiple attributes of Bitcoin. Our findings are insightful for future regulation and management of virtual currencies.     

Are gold,USD, and Bitcoin hedge or safe haven against stock? The implication for risk management

This study investigates whether gold, USD, and Bitcoin are hedge and safe haven assets against stock and if they are useful in diversifying downside risk for international stock markets. We propose a combined GO-GARCH-EVT-copula approach to examine the hedge and safe haven properties of gold, USD, and Bitcoin. We then examine the attractiveness of these assets in reducing stock portfolio risk by using downside risk measures estimated by the proposed approach and other competing models. We also evaluate the relative performance of the proposed model in reducing downside risk with the competing models. The findings of the study indicate that the USD is the most valuable hedge and safe haven asset closely followed by gold, while Bitcoin is the least valuable. It is also observed that the proposed combined approach performs best in reducing the portfolio downside risk. The findings of this study are of significance for portfolio managers and individual investors who wish to protect the portfolio value during market turmoil.