Who Finances Durable Goods and Why It Matters: Captive Finance and the Coase Conjecture

We propose that, by financing their own product sales through captive finance subsidiaries, durable goods manufacturers commit to higher resale values for their products in future periods. Using data on captive financing by the manufacturers of heavy equipment, we find that captive‐backed models have lower price depreciation. The evidence is consistent with captive finance helping manufacturers commit to ex‐post actions that support used machine prices. This, in turn, conveys higher pledgeability for captive‐backed products, even for individual machines financed by banks. Although motivated as a rent‐seeking device, captive financing generates positive spillovers by relaxing credit constraints.     

内蒙古地区装备制造业可持续发展对策研究

装备制造业是制造业的核心组成部分,是一国（或地区）国民经济发展特别是工业发展的基础。内蒙古地区装备制造业起步较早,但一直以来发展速度慢、产业规模小、品牌影响力弱、技术层次低,始终伴随着高投入、低产出、高能耗、低效率等不容忽视的问题,全要素生产率低下。在对内蒙古自治区装备制造业可持续发展态势进行深入分析的基础上,提出了促进内蒙古地区装备制造业可持续发展的对策建议。     

Match your innovation strategy to your innovation ecosystem

High-definition televisions should, by now, be a huge success. Philips, Sony, and Thompson invested billions of dollars to develop TV sets with astonishing picture quality. From a technology perspective, they've succeeded: Console manufacturers have been ready for the mass market since the early 1990s. Yet the category has been an unmitigated failure, not because of deficiencies, but because critical complements such as studio production equipment were not developed or adopted in time. Under-performing complements have left console producers in the position of offering a Ferrari in a world without gasoline or highways--an admirable engineering feat, but not one that creates value for customers. The HDTV story exemplifies the promise and peril of innovation ecosystems--the collaborative arrangements through which firms combine their individual offers into a coherent, customer-facing solution. When they work, innovation ecosystems allow companies to create value that no one firm could have created alone. The benefits of these systems are real. But for many organizations the attempt at ecosystem innovation has been a costly failure. This is because, along with new opportunities, innovation ecosystems also present a new set of risks that can brutally derail a firm's best efforts. Innovation ecosystems are characterized by three fundamental types of risk: initiative risks--the familiar uncertainties of managing a project; interdependence risks--the uncertainties of coordinating with complementary innovators; and integration risks--the uncertainties presented by the adoption process across the value chain. Firms that assess ecosystem risks holistically and systematically will be able to establish more realistic expectations, develop a more refined set of environmental contingencies, and arrive at a more robust innovation strategy. Collectively, these actions will lead to more effective implementation and more profitable innovation.     

The Supply‐Side Determinants of Loan Contract Strictness

Using a measure of contract strictness based on the probability of a covenant violation, I investigate how lender‐specific shocks impact the strictness of the loan contract that a borrower receives. Banks write tighter contracts than their peers after suffering payment defaults to their own loan portfolios, even when defaulting borrowers are in different industries and geographic regions from the current borrower. The effects persist after controlling for bank capitalization, although bank equity compression is also associated with tighter contracts. The evidence suggests that recent defaults inform the lender's perception of its own screening ability, thereby impacting its contracting behavior.     

存量房交易计税价格批量评估典型技术路线比较

针对我国存量房交易中存在的买卖双方低报交易价格问题,税务部门提出应将评税技术应用于房地产交易计税价格核定。丹东、杭州、南京作为试点城市建立了各自的存量房交易计税价格批量评估体系,其他城市可以学习和借鉴这三个城市的经验,再结合本地房地产市场情况,建立符合本地实际的应用房地产估价技术评估存量房交易价格申报工作的路径与方法。房地产评税技术的完善,一方面可以打击当前存量房交易中普遍存在的用“阴阳合同”逃避交易税费的行为;另一方面可以为正在推进的房产税改革以及住房保有环节征税等提供技术支持。     

Excess Cash and Shareholder Payout Strategies

On March 19, 2012, Apple announced a program to distribute its “excess” cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. This announcement followed a pattern that is remarkably similar to the one leading up to Microsoft's announcement in 2004. Likewise IBM, the bluest of blue chips, made a path‐breaking decision to initiate share buybacks in the 1980s. And as recently as April 2012, IBM, along with many other large corporations, announced yet another major share buyback program together with an increase in its dividend. These actions underscore the reality that senior management's main job is to allocate capital efficiently—and that efficient allocation of capital means distributing it when necessary. In light of these events, and the demand from shareholders that appears to be driving them, this paper explores analytical and empirical issues related to excess cash and corporate payout policy. In so doing, it provides the outline of an analytical framework for executives when thinking about the allocation of excess cash among competing uses, including deleveraging, growth, special and regular dividends, and share buybacks. The essence of the framework is this: Once companies satisfy their demands for cash based on their expected financial transactions, their targeted capital structure, and prospective investment (mergers and acquisitions) considerations, management should turn its attention to capital structure and shareholder payout decisions. Assuming that the company's capital structure is reasonably close to its target, and that its rating agencies are supportive, management should aim to pay a level of dividends that (1) reflects the underlying strength and stability of their projected earnings streams and that (2) satisfies the expectations of its core shareholders while positioning itself for the future. For more cyclical and otherwise riskier companies, management should also consider the use of stock buybacks or special dividends as a way of paying out the more variable, or unexpected, part of their expected earnings stream.     

Make your values mean something

Take a look at this list of corporate values: Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound pretty good, don't they? Maybe they even resemble your own company's values. If so, you should be nervous. These are the corporate values of Enron, as claimed in its 2000 annual report. And they're absolutely meaningless. Indeed, most values statements, says the author, are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest. And far from being harmless, as some executives assume, they're often highly destructive. Empty values statements create cynical and dispirited employees and undermine managerial credibility. But coming up with strong values--and sticking to them--isn't easy. Organizations that want their values statements to really mean something should follow four imperatives. First, understand the different types of values: core, aspirational, permission-to-play, and accidental. Confusing them with one another can bewilder employees and make management seem out of touch. Second, be aggressively authentic. Too many companies view a values initiative in the same way they view a marketing launch: a onetime event measured by the initial attention it receives, not by its content. Third, own the process. Values initiatives are about imposing a set of fundamental, strategically sound beliefs on a broad group of people. That's why the best values efforts are driven by small teams. Finally, weave core values into everything. It's not enough to hang your values statement on the wall; it must be integrated into every employee-related process--hiring methods, performance management systems, even dismissal policies. Living by stated corporate values is difficult. But the benefits of doing so can be profound; so can the damage from adopting a hollow set of corporate values.     

Charting your company's future

Few companies have a clear strategic vision. The problem, say the authors, stems from the strategic-planning process itself, which usually involves preparing a large document, culled from a mishmash of data provided by people with conflicting agendas. That kind of process almost guarantees an unfocused strategy. Instead, companies should design the strategic-planning process by drawing a picture: a strategy canvas. A strategy canvas shows the strategic profile of your industry by depicting the various factors that affect competition. And it shows the strategic profiles of your current and potential competitors as well as your own company's strategic profile--how it invests in the factors of competition and how it might in the future. The basic component of a strategy canvas--the value curve--is a tool the authors created in their consulting work and have written about in previous HBR articles. This article introduces a four-step process for actually drawing and discussing a strategy canvas. Readers will learn how one European financial services company used this process to create a distinct and easily communicable strategy. The process begins with a visual awakening. Managers compare their business's value curve with competitors' to discover where their strategy needs to change. In the next step--visual exploration--managers do field research on customers and alternative products. At the visual strategy fair, the third step, managers draw new strategic profiles based on field observations and get feedback from customers and peers about these new proposals. Once the best strategy is created from that feedback, it's time for the last step--visual communication. Executives distribute "before" and "after" strategic profiles to the whole company, and only projects that will help move the company closer to the "after" profile are supported.     

Managing our way to higher service-sector productivity

In the two decades following World War II, U.S. productivity grew at an annual rate of 3%. But since the beginning of the 1970s, it has grown at only about 1%. Had the earlier rate been sustained, the gross domestic product would now be about $11 trillion instead of about $6.5 trillion. That extra $4.5 trillion per year in economic output would have had a profound impact on a wide range of social and economic problems. What is preventing a productivity revival in the U.S. economy? Clearly not the manufacturing sector, which has rebounded since the early 1980s. The service sector, on the other hand, has seen productivity growth rates stagnate during the same period. Why? Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald believe that the usual explanations are incomplete and have resulted in some serious misconceptions. The authors point out the limitations of those explanations and offer one of their own. They lay the blame in two places: the ineffectiveness of many service-sector managers at improving productivity and the inherent complexity of the sector itself. The authors argue that the problem is not a lack of resources; rather, it is that service sector companies operate below their potential. If managers focused on putting the existing technologies, labor force, and capital stock to work, rapid productivity growth would follow. Although the service sector is complex, the authors believe that managers would do well to apply the same tools, techniques, and policies that have been so effective in manufacturing sector. Doing so would help them keep their eye on the ball - the efficiency of basic operations.     

The Relationship between Changes in Fixed Plant Investment and the Likelihood of Emergence from Corporate Financial Distress

Companies experiencing financial distress can attempt to mitigate financial distress through changing the investment in the fixed asset base. Management may choose to expand the asset base in hopes of increasing sales. Alternatively, management may choose to contract the asset base in order to eliminate and/or reduce investment in unprofitable or risky ventures, improve liquidity, reduce earnings volatility, and reduce the need for operating capital.In this study, we examined how observed changes in the investment base affect the likelihood of emergence from a financially distressed condition. We find that, when management chooses to contract the investment in property, plant, and equipment, the likelihood of emergence from financial distress is significantly improved. On the other hand, when management chooses to expand property, plant, and equipment in the face of distress, the distress is only intensified. Our explanation is that companies that choose to contract their fixed asset base in times of trouble are taking steps that will most likely improve their financial condition—they are less likely to need working capital, and can better tolerate increased levels of long-term debt. Conversely, increasing the fixed asset base amplifies the need for working capital, and borrowing money to facilitate the expansion simply increases the necessary uses of that working capital because the debt must be serviced. As a result, companies descend even deeper into financial distress and decrease the likelihood that they will emerge therefrom.     

Get inside the lives of your customers

Many companies have become adept at the art of customer relationship management. They've collected mountains of data on preferences and behavior, divided buyers into ever-finer segments, and refined their products, services, and marketing pitches. But all too often those efforts are too narrow--they concentrate only on the points where the customer comes into contact with the company. Few businesses have bothered to look at what the author calls the customer scenario--the broad context in which customers select, buy, and use products and services. As a result, consultant Patricia Seybold maintains, they've routinely missed chances to deepen loyalty and expand sales. In this article, the author shows how effective three very different companies have been at using customer scenarios as the centerpiece of their marketing plans. Chip maker National Semiconductor looked beyond the purchasing agents that buy in bulk to find ways to make it easier for engineers to design National's components into their specifications for mobile telephones. Each time they do so, it translates into millions of dollars in orders. By developing a customer scenario that describes how people actually shop for groceries, Tesco learned the importance of decentralizing its Web shopping site and how the extra costs of decentralization could be outweighed by the higher profit margins on-line customers generate. And Buzzsaw.com used customer scenarios as the basis for its entire business. It has used the Web to create a better way for the dozens of participants in a construction project to share their drawings and manage their projects. Seybold lays out the steps managers can take to develop their own customer scenarios. By thinking broadly about the challenges your customers face, she suggests, you can almost always find ways to make their lives easier--and thus earn their loyalty.     

The Dynamic Relations between the World's Leading Computer Companies and Their Corresponding OEM/ODM Firms

This paper explores the return dynamics between the world's major computer OBM firms and their corresponding OEM/ODM companies in Taiwan. We adopt a systematic multiple hypotheses testing method, the VAR test methodology, to test the dynamic relations. The result shows that there exist strong dynamic relations between the stock returns of the own-brand firms and their corresponding OEM/ODM firms. Specifically, returns of the OBM firms tend to lead those of their corresponding OEM/ODM companies. And the extent of this return lead-lag pattern increases with the closeness of the relationship between those OBM firms and their OEM/ODM partners. This implies that the OBM-OEM/ODM partnership is an important factor in the information set of the investors' trading strategies. In addition to the return dynamics, we also examine the volatility association and spillover effect between returns of these two types of firms. The result indicates a significant spillover effect of the current volatility of the OBM firms on future volatility of their corresponding OEM/ODM firms. Our results imply that the information transmission process between performance of the OBM firms and earnings power of the OEM/ODM companies is not only channeled through the first moment return lead-lag pattern, but also conducted by the second moment volatility spillover effect.     

Does the worldwide shift of FDI from manufacturing to services accelerate economic growth? A GMM estimation study

We examine the effect of manufacturing and service FDI (foreign direct investment) on their own sector growth, the spillover to the other sectors and the overall economy in host countries. We identify significant sectoral and inter-industry spillover effects with various data classifications and types of FDI flows. Evidence reveals that growth effect of manufacturing FDI operates by stimulating activity in its own (manufacturing) sector and is prevalent in Latin America-Caribbean, in Europe-Central Asia, middle to low-income countries and economies with large industry share. A surge of service FDI is likely to spur growth in service industries but hurt activity in manufacturing industries. Financial service FDI enhances growth in South-East Asia and the Pacific, high income countries and service-based economies by stimulating activity in both manufacturing and service sectors. However, nonfinancial service FDI drains resources and hurts manufacturing industry in the same group of countries. We conclude that a shift from manufacturing to service FDI is likely to lead to deindustrialization in certain regions and types of economies if this shift is spearheaded by nonfinancial FDI.     

Finding your next core business

How do you know when your core needs to change? And how do you determine what should replace it? From an in-depth study of 25 companies, the author, a strategy consultant, has discovered that it's possible to measure the vitality of a business's core. If it needs reinvention, he says, the best course is to mine hidden assets. Some of the 25 companies were in deep crisis when they began the process of redefining themselves. But, says Zook, management teams can learn to recognize early signs of erosion. He offers five diagnostic questions with which to evaluate the customers, key sources of differentiation, profit pools, capabilities, and organizational culture of your core business. The next step is strategic regeneration. In four-fifths of the companies Zook examined, a hidden asset was the centerpiece of the new strategy. He provides a map for identifying the hidden assets in your midst, which tend to fall into three categories: undervalued business platforms, untapped insights into customers, and underexploited capabilities. The Swedish company Dometic, for example, was manufacturing small absorption refrigerators for boats and RVs when it discovered a hidden asset: its understanding of, and access to, customers in the RV market. The company took advantage of a boom in that market to refocus on complete systems for live-in vehicles. The Danish company Novozymes, which produced relatively low-tech commodity enzymes such as those used in detergents, realized that its underutilized biochemical capability in genetic and protein engineering was a hidden asset and successfully refocused on creating bioengineered specialty enzymes. Your next core business is not likely to announce itself with fanfare. Use the author's tools to conduct an internal audit of possibilities and pinpoint your new focus.     

论消费者自主选择权的保护——以数字电视为视角

消费者自主选择权是消费者最为核心的权利之一,消费者自主选择权的正当性基础是平衡正义、消费者的弱者地位及其意思表示不自由。而数字电视提供者滥用其垄断地位以格式合同剥夺了消费者自主选择权,极大冲击了契约自由原则。政府与数字电视提供商利用"公共利益"之名合法化其自身利益,损害消费者的自主选择权。因而,应完善垄断行业消费者权益保护的相关立法、执法及诉讼机制,更好保护消费者自主选择权。     

CAPITAL MARKET EXCESSES AND COMPETITIVE STRENGTH: THE CASE OF THE HARD DISK DRIVE INDUSTRY 1984–2000

In a much-cited 1985 study of the U.S. hard disk drive industry entitled "Capital Market Myopia," William Sahlman and Howard Stevenson concluded that "excesses in the capital markets turned an opportunity into a disaster" for investors in the emerging industry. Sahlman and Stevenson fretted about what their findings implied not only for investors but also for the industrial competitiveness of the U.S.A.
With the benefit of hindsight, the research presented in this article shows how the hard disk drive industry has evolved in the past 15 years to the point where disk drives are a vital part of the information technology revolution that has transformed the way we live, work, and play. The authors' research examines the financial performance of both hard disk drive manufacturers and storage system manufacturers completely dependent on hard disk drives; looks at improvements in the technical performance of hard drives; and then compares the competitiveness of U.S. companies with foreign manufacturers.
After the venture capital/IPO bubble of the early 1980s gave way to the traditional discipline of U.S. financial markets, many weak companies were driven out of business and others were forced to consolidate. Only a handful of the startup firms survived. But these U.S companies, together with IBM, now dominate the global hard drive market. Moreover, there are striking parallels between the 1982–84 hard drive bubble and the recent experience of U.S. Internet firms. Although the first half of 2000 saw a large number of closings, forced sales, and IPO cancellations by American dot-coms, a number of the likely "survivors"—notably, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon.com—now seem poised to dominate their global markets.     

The Effects of State Risk and Controllability Filters on Compensation Contract and Effort Choice

Surveys of business firms in the U.S.A. indicate that standard-based compensation contracts are common in practice. Analytical studies of this form of contract have suggested that under conditions of state risk, an employee's contract and effort choice are significantly affected by how pay relates to measured performance, and whether the compensation contract filters out the effects on measured performance of factors beyond the employee's control. This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment indicating that in the presence of state risk, an individual's choice of compensation contract depends jointly on these two contract attributes and his/her risk preference as well as performance capability. The findings also indicate that actual effort is a function of the realized state, the presence/absence of a controllability filter, and the level at which the individual had expected to perform at the time of his/her contract selection. When an adverse state was realized, subjects without a controllability filter still exerted the level of effort that they had expected at contract selection, even though their marginal return to effort had been substantially reduced. On the other hand, when the controllability filter was absent, subjects who had a favourable realized state increased their effort in response to the increased marginal return to effort.     

Control your inventory in a world of lean retailing

As retailers adopt lean retailing practices, manufacturers are feeling the pinch. Retailers no longer place large seasonal orders for goods in advance-instead, they require ongoing replenishment of stock, forcing manufacturers to predict demand and then hold substantial inventories indefinitely. Manufacturers now carry the cost of inventory risk--the possibility that demand will dry up and goods will have to be sold below cost. And as product proliferation increases, customer demand becomes harder to predict. Most manufacturers apply one inventory policy for all stock-keeping units in a product line. But the inventory demand for SKUs within the same product line can vary significantly. SKUs with high volume typically have little variation in weekly sales, while slow-selling SKUs can vary enormously in weekly sales. The greater the variation, the larger the inventory the manufacturer must hold relative to an SKU's expected weekly sales. By differentiating inventory policies at the SKU level, manufacturers can reduce inventories for the high-volume SKUs and increase them for the low-volume ones--and thereby improve the profit-ability of the entire line. SKU-level differentiation can also be applied to sourcing strategies. Instead of producing all the SKUs for a product line at a single location, either offshore at low cost or close to market at higher cost, manufacturers can typically do better by going for a mixed allocation. Low-variation goods should be produced mainly offshore, while high-variation goods are best made close to markets.     

Reclaim your job

Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative--the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.     

MUNICIPAL CONTRACTING OUT: GOVERNANCE CHOICES,MISALIGNMENT AND PERFORMANCE IN SWEDISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT

In this paper we apply a Transaction Cost Theory framework to analyse the use and effects of contracting out in Swedish local government. During the last decade Swedish local authorities, like in many other countries, have, to a larger extent, started to contract external subcontractors to fulfil their responsibilities towards its citizens. It is not only in the traditional subcontracting sectors such as housing, infrastructure, and technical services that this trend is evident, but also in policy areas like education, social care, and elderly care. In fact, very little is known about the overall effects of, and the mechanisms underlying, governance choices. The overall results corroborate transaction cost reasoning. Supplier competition and specificity have anticipated effects on municipal de‐integration. Too little, but not too much, use of contracting out, in relation to theoretical predictions, worsens performance. The latter aspect is not fully in accordance with TCE‐propositions.