中国企业的跨国竞购——卖方主导市场中的交易策略

目前,国家正在大力支持企业积极稳妥地通过并购国外企业,获取能源、矿产等资源,获得国际知名品牌、先进技术以及营销网络,实现规模和市场的有效扩张.在本文中,信保专家将与大家共同探讨当今国际并购市场的实务问题     

Normality of the future: Trend diagnosis for strategic foresight

Foresight processes and activities are confronted with the task of making sense of the present, in particular by interpreting weak signals of change in the organizational environment. Although trends are considered to be important drivers of environmental discontinuities which may lead to strategic surprises, there is no operationalization from a strategic point of view. In this paper we are going to conceptualize trends as (socio-cultural) innovations. This leads to important implications. If the nature of innovation is taken seriously, then strategic trend diagnosis has to deal with two different aspects, invention and diffusion. First, we are going to present a framework for identifying the invention aspect of a trend (i.e., “the new”) which is based on the fact that “the new” results from a transgression of contextual boundaries. Second, we are going to operationalize the diffusion of “the new” as a threefold process of normalization - i.e., an unusual practice becomes social convention. Taken together, these two aspects provide a theoretical link between trends and market creation. In addition, by relating the above operationalizations to an entrepreneurial strategy-making framework, strategic issue diagnosis can be improved and more seamlessly linked to strategy formulation.     

On the nurturing of strategic foresight: The Ubuntu perspective

We draw on ideas from the African humanistic philosophy of Ubuntu with existing approaches to propose alternative ways of nurturing strategic foresight in practice. Delineating Ubuntu as a transient organizing philosophy, we show how the integration of Ubuntu in everyday organizing could enhance relational pluralism, and in-turn strategic foresight. Embarking on some mild speculative expedition based on ideas from Ubuntu, we also outline some activities and organizing routines of team leaders that may contribute to encouraging employees to enact ‘foresightful’ actions in their situated practice. We conclude with implications of our study for organizing and some directions for futureresearch.     

The role of hindsight in foresight: refining strategic reasoning

The purpose of this paper is to deepen understanding of the role that hindsight plays in foresight. The authors argue that the past is not an isolated static state, but one that is intimately connected with the future. However, there are several biases that influence our perceptions and conceptions of the past. These biases act as constraints on our ability to understand the driving forces that emerge from the past, play out through the present and become the critical uncertainties in the future. They could result in misperceptions about events or processes and so may impair foresight methodologies, such as scenario thinking. Such a foresight bias is characterized by a combination of hindsight biases, creeping determinism and searching for information that corresponds to people’s views about both the past and the future.The cognitive linkages between past, present and future are discussed and the role of counter-to-factual analysis is emphasized as an antidote to the foresight bias. Counter-to-factual analysis is both a cognitive process and an analytical reasoning tool applied to the analysis of historical data. Using insights generated from the explorations of counter-to-factual reasoning, the authors present a hindsight-foresight paragon that fortifies current foresight enhancing techniques with counter-to-factual analysis.

Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

To where it bent in the undergrowth…

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

Men’s curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

T. S. Eliot, from The Dry Salvages     

Exchange rates and FDI strategies of multinational enterprises

We examine the role of both the volatility and levels of exchange rates in the determination of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) investments using a unique Korean dataset. These data provide a natural laboratory due to the Korean experience of a severe financial crisis in the late nineties. We find, first, that the behavior of foreign investors in Korea has changed following the 1997 crisis. The change in foreign direct investment (FDI) in response to exchange rate volatility is robust, while that to exchange rate level is quite mixed, which is consistent with recently developed real option-based FDI theory. Second, the effect of exchange rate volatility on FDI is persistent, whereas that of misalignment of level is only temporary, suggesting that MNEs regard volatility as a more generic determinant of foreign investment than misalignment of the exchange rate level. Third, we find strong evidence of nonlinearity between uncertainty and FDI, which may shed some light on why existing literature shows mixed results on the relation between exchange rate variables and FDI.     

中国企业进入南非电力市场的金融支持建议

中国和南非之间不平衡的供电布局为中国电力企业进入南非提供了市场商机,而且,中南之间日益密切的贸易和投资关系也为中国电力企业进入南非创造了良好的投资环境     

Reprint of Investors’ distraction and strategic repricing decisions

In this paper I analyze investors’ reactions to changes in the expense ratios of equity mutual funds. I show that investment flows’ response to fees cannot be fully explained by looking at investors’ performance sensitivity. While performance sensitivity monotonically increases with past performance, price sensitivity does not: investors who buy top past performers seem to be “distracted” by the fund’s previous return and pay relatively little attention to the expense ratios. Moreover price sensitivity increases with fund visibility while performance sensitivity decreases, and while looking at data from 1986 to 2006 no discernible trend can be observed in the average performance sensitivity, price sensitivity strongly increases due to the dramatic increase in the availability of mutual funds’ information for retail investors. Finally I show that investment companies strategically time their repricing decisions in order to exploit time variations in price and performance sensitivities, and that fund governance quality affects the degree to which investment companies engage in this opportunistic behavior.     

Fear of foresight: Knowledge and ignorance in organizational foresight

We discuss the changes occurring in the field of organizational foresight. The analysis results from viewing foresight from two different perspectives: as centered on the future or on the present; as macroscopic analysis or microscopic practice. The combination of these factors results in four different modes of organizational foresight: strategic planning, visioning, scenario thinking and planned emergence. These different perspectives are examined. We contribute to the literature by presenting foresight as a complex process, amenable to different understandings. Foresight is often portrayed as a technical and analytic process. We discuss it as a human process permeated by a dialectic between the need to know and the fear of knowing.     

跨国公司在中国的发展走势

跨国公司在华投资的不断增加有力地带动了中国经济融入全球化潮流。当前一个值得关注的问题是：如何正确评价和发挥跨国公司作用？这里存在一个思想障碍就是如何看待在华跨国公司企业。这些企业是中国企业还是外国企业？     

Causes and consequences of short-term institutional herding

This paper provides new evidence on the causes and consequences of herding by institutional investors. Using a comprehensive database of every transaction made by financial institutions in the German stock market, we show that institutions exhibit herding behavior on a daily basis. Herding intensity depends on stock characteristics including past returns and volatility. Return reversals indicate a destabilizing impact of herds on stock prices in the short term. Results from panel regressions suggest that herding is mainly unintentional and partly driven by the use of similar risk models. Our findings confirm the importance of macro-prudential aspects for banking regulation.     

Causes and consequences of goodwill impairment losses

The paper examines the reaction of market participants to the announcement of a goodwill impairment loss, the nature of the information conveyed by the loss, and whether a cause of goodwill impairment can be traced back to overpayment for targets at the time of prior acquisitions. Our evidence suggests that both investors and financial analysts revise their expectations downward on the announcement of an impairment loss. We find that the negative impact of the loss is significant under different reporting regimes, that is, pre-SFAS-142, transition period and post-SFAS-142, though it is lower in the post period. We further show that goodwill impairment serves as a leading indicator of a decline in future profitability. Our tests also reveal that proxies for overpayment for targets can predict the subsequent goodwill impairment. Indirect evidence suggests that firms with potentially impaired goodwill that did not report an impairment loss may have used their managerial discretion to avoid taking the loss.     

跨国公司在华“合规”经营的挑战与应对

反商业贿赂是跨国公司“合规”管理的重要内容。已有许多跨国企业不惜花费巨额用于在华合规管理,但维持可持续的合规管理是一个长期的过程。作为企业负责合规管理和内控体系的财务和法律合规部门,如何构建一个有效的合规框架？在中国面临哪些合规风险？如何识别欺诈风险和展开内部调查？请看     

国际再保险业战略发展模式及其对我国的借鉴

按照再保险战略发展模式的历史演进顺序,将目前国际再保险业的战略发展模式总结为四种:专业再保险模式,再保与直保一体化模式,金融一体化单元模式和多元化单元模式。结合选取了不同发展模式的典型国际再保险公司,对不同模式进行分析和比较,并进一步提出了我国再保险业战略发展建议。     

Evolution in the rationales of foresight in Europe

The traditional mechanistic approach to Strategic Thinking influenced the rationales and consequently the early experiences of Technology Forecasting in Europe. On the other hand, the more recent dynamic non-linear approaches to Strategic Thinking and a gradual regionalization of the innovation policy have favoured the replacement of Forecasting with Foresight and, more recently, with Regional Foresight, where the complexity of phenomena is taken into greater account. In fact, during the last few decades, a transition has occurred from a mainly hierarchic capitalism to a flexible one. At micro-economic level, this has caused a gradual transition from hierarchical organisational models with tangible assets to network organisational models, which are knowledge-based and face complex and unsettled scenarios.

This paper tries to demonstrate that the concepts of Forecasting and Foresight cannot be considered outside of this context and of changes that have occurred in Strategic Thinking, where the needs for more global and interdisciplinary views of problems are striving to integrate Strategic management and Entrepreneurship into the new concept of Strategic Entrepreneurship.

In order to demonstrate this evolution in the rationales of foresight and in its applications, this work analyses and compares some among the more significant experiences of transition towards Regional Foresight in Europe.     

The strategic use of corporate insurance in China

We use the agency theory to conduct a novel test of the strategic use of property insurance in China's corporate sector. With regard to our main test hypotheses, we find that the incidence of property insurance purchased is directly related to the degree of product–market competitiveness, and positively related to market liquidity and firms’ growth opportunities. However, the homogeneity of market operations is not statistically significant. In our second-stage Cragg regression, market liquidity becomes insignificant while firms’ growth opportunities are now inversely related to the amount of insurance purchased. Additionally, the homogeneity of market operations becomes significantly related to the corporate purchase of property insurance. Therefore, different factors (e.g. cost considerations) may influence the decisions to purchase property insurance and subsequently, the level of coverage provided. We argue that our results are relevant for companies in other emerging markets such as Eastern Europe and companies operating in more developed Western economies such as the European Union (EU).     

R&D intensity for innovative and adaptive purposes in overseas subsidiaries: Evidence from Japanese multinational enterprises

This paper investigates the causes of R&D activities of overseas subsidiaries using firm-level panel data for Japanese multinationals. We distinguish between overseas innovative R&D (basic and applied research) and adaptive R&D (development and design) and examine how the intensity of each type of R&D is determined, using Amemiya Generalized Least Squares estimation. Our findings suggest that overseas innovative R&D aims at the exploitation of foreign knowledge, whereas adaptive R&D has no such aim. In addition, the size of the host country’s market positively affects both types, whereas geographic distance between the host and the home country has a negative impact. Finally, the parent firm’s knowledge is found to increase the size of overseas adaptive R&D but not innovative R&D. Based on a theoretical model, we interpret this evidence as showing that knowledge of the parent firm is not fully utilized in innovative R&D of its subsidiary.     

当前中国通货膨胀的成因和对策

当前中国通货膨胀形成的原因包括需求拉动、自然灾害、通胀预期、市场投机等短期因素和增长方式转变、经济结构调整、自然资源有限性、要素价格重估、成本推动等长期因素.本文认为适度通胀有利于当前经济结构调整和经济发展方式转变.当前宏观调控效果初步显现,短期还应继续实行适度紧缩政策,但紧缩力度需逐步降低;应参考一篮子货币,保持人民...     

发达国家国有企业监管模式及其对我国国有资产管理的启示

根据国际货币基金组织的分类,发达国家的国有企业主要分为三种类型:第一类是国营企业,指由中央或地方政府直接投资经营的企业,这类性质的企业大多与国计民生相关,主要向社会提供公共产品,如意大利的铁路管理机构、荷兰的邮政电信机构等;第二类是国办企业,是指按照特殊法律、法规创办和经营的企业,这类企业归政府所有,或者由政府采取特殊方式进行控制,如英国、法国的国有化企业;第三类是国控企业,是指按照公司法建立起来的国有企业,政府持有一定比例的股份,这类企业大多存在于竞争性领域和行业。发达国家受社会制度、经济体制、资源配置方式…     

我国房地产泡沫现象的成因与对策

近年来,我国房地产业高速发展,成为拉动内需,推动经济增长的支柱产业,而房地产价格节节攀升,随之产生的房地产泡沫引起了广泛关注。有效治理房地产泡沫经济,加快我国城市化进程,扩大城市居民的人均住房面积,关键是要针对我国的实际国情,在正确分析市场动态的基础上通过及时调控,做出正确的判断,并采取相应的措施,使我国的房地产市场能够持续、稳定、健康地发展。