Matching managers to strategies: Point and counterpoint

In recent years, an emerging and increasingly popular theme in the strategic management literature has been that the selection of general managers should be tied directly to the strategies of business units they will oversee. Because different strategies imply different priorities and the need for different skills, such a proposition has obvious intuitive appeal. Beyond intuitive appeal and supporting conceptual arguments, recent empirical research on whether matching general managers to strategies “pays off” in terms of more effective strategy implementation has also yielded positive results. Despite this evidence, several arguments exist for why it may not always be feasible, necessary, or desirable to match general managers to strategies. Thus, there is need for a point-counterpoint “debate” on the subject of matching general managers to strategies. Based on a review of the relvant literature, logical reasoning, as well as some case evidence, this paper is intended to be such a debate undertaken by the author with himself. It is hoped that such a dialectical analysis will open up new avenues for productive research and also enable corporate executives to make better “managerial selection” decisions.     

Globalization and trade union strategy: industrial restructuring and human resource management in the international civil aviation industry

For trade unions, the central problematic of globalization is the growing disparity between the mobility of capital and labour. The ability of capital to operate on a trans-national basis is widely perceived to have precipitated a process of cost cutting as international companies seek to cut workers' remuneration and other conditions of employment. However, systematic empirical evidence on the impact of globalization on human resource management is hard to find, as is any assessment of the differential impact of globalization on different occupational groups or the response of trade unions to any deterioration in their members' terms and conditions of employment. Focusing on the international civil aviation industry, we examine the effects of globalization on human resource management and the national and international strategies developed by organized labour in response. Although the evidence suggests that there is indeed a concerted effort by major airlines to cut costs, trade unions have been able to retard the pace of change and effectively defend the interests of some occupational groups. Moreover, the future course of globalization will be contested through new international strategies and repertoires of collective action developed by the trade union movement.     

公司治理、环境不确定性与债务资本成本

以2011—2014年深沪A股上市公司为研究对象，实证分析公司治理与环境不确定性对债务资本成本的影响，结果显示环境不确定性和债务资本成本显著正相关，这说明企业面临的外部环境不确定性越高，其所承担的债务资本成本也随之增加。同时，公司治理水平对环境不确定性与债务资本成本的关系具有一定的抑制作用。研究结果表明，高的公司治理水平可以在一定程度上缓解环境不确定性对债务资本成本的冲击。因此，提高公司治理水平具有必要性。     

The content of manufacturing strategy: An empirical study

While there has been an extensive literature written on manufacturing strategy since the 1960s, little empirical research has been done. This article reports on a study of manufacturing strategy in thirty-nine companies based on questionnaire responses received from manufacturing managers.The study indicates that things are not as bleak as the literature might suggest. About one-third of the companies appear to have a well-developed manufacturing strategy. In those cases where the manufacturing strategy exists it is consistent with the business strategy and internally consistent among mission, objectives, policies, and distinctive competence.The term “manufacturing strategy” is not well understood by the managers surveyed. When asked to state their manufacturing strategy, they gave statements about what manufacturing should be, what it should do, how it should do it, and why it should do it. Apparently, the terminology itself is confusing. Frameworks for stating both business strategies and the elements of manufacturing strategy need to be strengthened and some specific suggestions are given in the article for doing so.Even though two-thirds of the companies did not have well-developed manufacturing strategies, 80% of the managers felt that manufacturing had lent competitive strength to the business. This was being done through the development of a distinctive competence in manufacturing that provided competitive advantage.Manufacturing strategies seemed to follow from business strategy. This is contrary to the literature, which indicates that manufacturing strategy is missing, or, at the very least inconsistent with business strategy and marketing strategy. Perhaps a stronger relationship exists than was previously thought. This article provides some evidence for establishing this premise and also provides data on the general status of strategy in manufacturing today.     

EVT and tail-risk modelling: Evidence from market indices and volatility series

Value-at-Risk (VaR) has become the universally accepted risk metric adopted internationally under the Basel Accords for banking industry internal control, capital adequacy and regulatory reporting. The recent extreme financial market events such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) commencing in 2007 and the following developments in European markets mean that there is a great deal of attention paid to risk measurement and risk hedging. In particular, to risk indices and attached derivatives as hedges for equity market risk. The techniques used to model tail risk such as VaR have attracted criticism for their inability to model extreme market conditions. In this paper we discuss tail specific distribution based Extreme Value Theory (EVT) and evaluate different methods that may be used to calculate VaR ranging from well known econometrics models of GARCH and its variants to EVT based models which focus specifically on the tails of the distribution. We apply Univariate Extreme Value Theory to model extreme market risk for the FTSE100 UK Index and S&P-500 US markets indices plus their volatility indices. We show with empirical evidence that EVT can be successfully applied to financial market return series for predicting static VaR, CVaR or Expected Shortfall (ES) and also daily VaR and ES using a GARCH(1,1) and EVT based dynamic approach to these various indices. The behaviour of these indices in their tails have implications for hedging strategies in extreme market conditions.     

The market reaction to announced deep cuts in capital expenditures

The objective of the study reported in this paper was to examine the role of deep cuts in capital expenditures as a firm's strategy for becoming more efficient and, in turn, more competitive. Based on an empirical study, support is provided for the argument that deep cuts in capital expenditures may be a viable strategy for realigning corporate priorities toward a more efficient operation. The measure of performance utilized in this paper is the stock market reaction to announced deep cuts.     

Contrasting Models of the Effect of Inflation on Growth

Abstract.  The paper formulates a nesting model for studying the theoretical literature on inflation and endogenous growth. It analyses different classes of endogenous growth models, with different usage of physical and human capital, with different exchange technologies. First, the paper shows that a broad array of models can all generate significant negative effects of inflation on growth. Second, it shows that these models can be differentiated primarily by the fact whether there is a Tobin-type effect of inflation and also whether the inflation–growth effect becomes weaker as the inflation rate rises, a non-linearity, or stays essentially constant over the range of inflation rates. The paper compares these features of the models to empirical evidence as a way to summarize the efficacy of the models.     

Causes and effects of multimarket activity from theory to empirical analysis

In this paper some of the results emerged in the empirical literature on diversification are put into perspective against the background of a simple integrative model of multiproduct firms. By letting diversification strategies depend on the simultaneous play of four factors (demand relationships and technological links between goods, collusion within a market and across markets), the latter provides an illustrative framework which is useful to discuss how effectively the issue of ambiguous findings has been tackled in applied works. In some cases scholars have devoted substantial effort in order to build tests which can successfully discriminate among the different views on the causes and effects of diversification, while in other circumstances empirical investigations have been conducted with much less care. Other then criticising some of the methods used in the past, the paper provides a number of suggestions that can help guiding future empirical work on corporate diversification. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time to build capital: Revisiting investment-cash-flow sensitivities

A large body of empirical work has established the significance of cash flow in explaining investment dynamics. This finding is further taken as evidence of capital market imperfections. We show, using a perfect capital markets model, that time-to-build for capital projects creates an investment-cash-flow sensitivity as found in empirical studies that may not be indicative of capital market frictions. The result is due to mis-specification present in empirical investment-q equations under time-to-build investment. In addition, time aggregation error can give rise to cash-flow effects independently of the time-to-build effect. Importantly, both errors arise independently of potential measurement error in q. Evidence from a large panel of U.K. manufacturing firms confirms the validity of the time-to-build investment channel.     

The impact of corporate strategy on the capital structure of Australian companies

Research into the capital structure of firms has been the subject of extensive empirical investigation but further progress may be constrained by the conventional paradigm underlying most of this work. This paper seeks to extend the debate by examining the endogenous influence of corporate strategy on financing decisions made by firms. While the theoretical specification of the possible relationship has to be developed further, various models were constructed and company data from Australia, an economy with some notoriety for fairly loose corporate debt management, was used to examine various hypothesized relationships. Our analysis suggests that corporate strategy influences capital structure, particularly for the most diversified firms, and that the emerging relationship is complex. Profit, cash flow, the rate of growth and the level of earnings risk are important additional internal influences on capital structure. The results are reasonably robust and indicate that this focus of enquiry has considerable potential for further resolution of the capital structure puzzle, as well as contributing to the debate on the impact of institutional shareholders on the corporate strategy of the firms in which they invest.     

The precious bane

Are natural resources harmful to growth? We address this question using a two-sector, endogenous growth model in which human capital is the engine of growth. By increasing the rewards to unskilled labor, natural resources make schooling more expensive. As long as the intertemporal elasticity of consumption substitution is not too high, this slows down human capital accumulation and growth. The presence of production spillovers from human capital, however, implies that a planner could react to a resource boom by increasing human capital accumulation even though the decentralized solution yields the exact opposite. The paper also shows that as the production complementarity between natural resources and unskilled labor declines, the growth effects of natural resources become increasingly sensitive to whether or not there is free trade in goods. The empirical evidence lends support to the main channel – natural resources to human capital to growth – that is suggested in the paper.     

企业所得税对企业资本结构影响的文献综述

资本结构决策是企业发展过程中的重要决策手段,而企业所得税在企业纳税活动中占有重要的地位,企业债务融资利息可以在企业所得税前支付,即负债资金具有避税的效应,因此,在企业所得税因素的影响下,企业选择债务融资的效应更佳,二者存在一定的关联关系。论文主要从企业所得税对资本结构影响的理论研究、实证研究两个方面来对二者的关系的文献进行梳理。     

Restricting capital outflow

According to the “Capital Asset Pricing Model”, an individual can increase his utility by diversifying his capital across countries. If that is the case, then why do governments impose restrictions on capital outflow? This paper argues that foreign owners of capital have less political power than domestic ones and therefore capital liberalization weakens the political power that protects capital, increases the taxation of capital and thus reduces total investment. Indeed, most of the empirical evidence suggests that capital liberalization is positively correlated with government expenditure, social security spending and corporate taxation.     

Long waves or catastrophes in regional development

This paper addresses itself to long-term economic developments in a spatial context. Particular attention is paid to the recent discussion on long-term cycles and the impacts of innovations. The spatial diffusion and impacts of long waves, especially in a regional setting with threshold levels and bottlenecks, are also discussed, while also some empirical evidence regarding long-term developments in the Netherlands is given. After a brief survey of some long-run spatio-temporal models, a dynamic model based on elements of catastrophe theory is developed. This model includes inter alia productive capital, social overhead capital (infrastructure) and R & D capital as main driving forces. Various stability aspects of this dynamic control model are finally examined.     

Getting the best solution from a supplier – A social capital perspective

Due to the current shift towards solution provision in many industrial markets, buyers are under increasing pressure to develop sourcing strategies to procure custom solutions for their firm in order to achieve competitive advantage. The question arises as to how buyers can ensure they get the best solutions from their suppliers and whether social capital can be applied to improve solution provision processes and value creation. Existing empirical research, however, has paid only little attention to the antecedents of suppliers’ solution provision performance, i.e., their capability to diagnose buyer needs and to design and implement solutions to meet them. We tested how social capital dimensions (relational, cognitive, and structural) relate to solution provision. The study uses empirical data obtained from a survey of 475 suppliers representing both manufacturing and service industries. Partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM) and polynomial regression were used to analyze the data. The results demonstrate that the availability of social capital in a buyer-supplier relationship is a relevant antecedent to successful solution provision activities. However, the different dimensions of social capital are found to compensate for each other to some extent. Our study further demonstrates that solution provision is not a monolithic activity but can better be understood as a multi-phase process (diagnosis, solution design, and implementation). Different aspects of social capital may have a different impact depending on the phase of solution provision. The successful diagnosis of buyer needs mediates the effect of social capital on solution design and implementation. It is also found that production characteristics of a buyer and the type of a supplier solution affect the role of social capital in solution provision process.     

European Works Councils and the dark side of managing worker voice

Drawing from case study research, the article explores managerial strategies in a UK‐based European Works Council (EWC), but from the perspective of workers' representatives. This methodological approach offers an alternative set of lens through which to view managerial strategy from the standpoint of those it is meant to affect. The evidence suggests that employers' representatives in central management appear to be proactively fragmenting worker voice, arguably in order to convert the EWC into a business‐friendly instrument and to assert managerial control. However, there is no empirical basis for arguing that such tactics yield organisational benefits. The employers' perceived strategies reflect the traditional cultural antagonisms that are historically played out between workers and managers in the particular sector in which the firm is embedded. The article has practical implications for HR managers who are viewed, rightly or wrongly, with suspicion and distrust by employee representatives.     

MANAGING THE PROCESS OF REMOVING CAPITAL CONTROLS: WHAT DOES THE LITERATURE SUGGEST?

Economic theory suggests that opening the capital account should allow a country to diversify away economic shocks, increase capital inflows, expand economic growth and efficiency as well as encourage governments to pursue good policies. The empirical evidence with regard to these theoretical predictions, however, are in some instances debatable. Many studies, for example, have reported mixed results as it relates to the impact of capital account integration on growth, exchange rates, trade and policy discipline. This paper provides a review of this literature as well as some recommendations for policymakers in relation to managing the process of removing capital controls.     

Promoting the informal sector as a source of gainful employment in developing countries: insights from Ghana

Although the informal sector continues to be the main source of employment in developing countries, little empirical research has been conducted into the human resource management (HRM) issues surrounding this sector in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this background, this study seeks to highlight the HRM issues, such as training and employment strategy, which are assuming increasing importance in the informal sector in developing countries. After reviewing the marginalist and structuralist debates on the informal sector, the paper looks at the Ghanaian government's attempt to transform the sector into a source of national economic development, entrepreneurship and self-employment. As part of this examination, the paper explores the question of whether the government's strategies can provide jobs for all who need them.

Based on the evidence of the empirical research, the paper argues that although the current Ghanaian government's informal employment strategy is a product of political expediency and, therefore, prone to pitfalls, it nevertheless constitutes a worthwhile attempt to combat unemployment in the long term. The paper also contends that in environments of perpetual economic crisis, which undermine the ability of sub-Saharan African (SSA) governments to generate adequate growth, it makes good socio-economic sense to promote the informal sector as a significant source of employment. The government's strategy should, therefore, be seen as an attempt to help the informal sector generate a level of employment above the marginal and survival. In this respect, the Ghanaian experience provides useful lessons for other SSA countries grappling with similar unemployment problems.     

Endogenous fertility, multiple growth paths, and economic convergence

"This paper extends the Cass-Koopmans optimal growth model to allow for endogenous fertility choice. It is shown that if agents choose their fertility rate, then the net rate of return on capital (marginal product of capital minus the population growth rate) may not be monotonically decreasing in capital. In this case, multiple steady states and growth paths may emerge, which can explain the persistent differentials in income between poor and rich countries, as well as the existence of development miracles and disasters. The paper provides also empirical evidence which supports the existence of multiple convergence groups and is consistent with the theoretical model."     

上市公司担保公告的信息含量

本文在国内外相关研究文献回顾及中国资本市场特殊环境分析的基础上,对我国上市公司担保公告的市场反应进行了实证研究。结果发现,上市公司发布担保公告日前后出现显著为负的累积非正常报酬。研究中我们按担保方式、担保对象对担保公告进行分类,发现不同的担保公告蕴含不同的信息含量:互保、单向信用担保、非关联方担保这三种担保的市场反应为负;而具有反担保措施的担保公告市场反应为正;对于关联方担保,市场没有显著的反应。