Who is more visionary in mergers: Commercial vs. investment banks

Early papers concerning bankers on board usually focus on the rationale of bank entry and such effects on company performance. Recently, Güner, Malmendier, and Tate (2008) started to look at the different effects of the bankers with different expertise on the investment strategy and post-entry performance of the firms on which they have board seats. This study extends this line of research to further examine the relationship between the change of different types of financial professionals’ equity holdings of acquiring firms prior to merger completion dates and these acquirers’ post-merger performance. Using 381 U.S. listed acquirers during 2000–2005, we find that the changes of the ownership of commercial banks and insurance companies are positively related to the acquirers’ short-term performance. However, only the changes of the ownership of investment bankers are negatively related to the bidders’ long-term performance, implying that, due to conflict of interests, investment bankers probably aim at the increase of the short-run post-merger performance of the acquiring companies of which they have relatively larger equity holdings.     

Labor turnover before plant closure: “Leaving the sinking ship” vs. “Captain throwing ballast overboard”

Involuntary job loss in administrative data is commonly identified by exploiting the exogenous nature of mass layoffs or plant closures. However, prior knowledge can lead to selection in the labor turnover of distressed firms. This paper proposes a simple method to determine if and when selective turnover sets in. Based on a rich administrative data set for Austria, we show that separations up to two quarters before plant closure should be included in the treatment group. Moreover, we find that early leavers are associated with significantly lower costs of job loss due to plant closure.     

沉井下沉分析

沉井的施工工艺并不复杂,施工时对邻近建筑物的影响较小,内部空间可以利用,因此在工程上,沉井有广泛的应用。文章依据长沙市北站路泵站的实例,对沉井下沉进行分析。     

Credit vs. demand constraints: The determinants of US firm-level investment over the business cycles from 1977 to 2011

The paper studies empirically how relative supply and demand conditions on the capital market affected US firm-level investment over the business cycles from 1977 to 2011. A dynamic econometric specification of capital accumulation including sales growth, Tobin's q, the cash flow-capital ratio and the cost of capital as covariates is fitted by a rolling window System GMM estimator using quarterly data on publicly traded US corporations in order to obtain time-varying coefficients. We find that the investment effects of the variables capturing the demand-side of the capital market, i.e. sales growth and Tobin's q, behave counter-cyclically, whereas this does not hold for the investment effects of supply-side variables such as cash flow or the cost of capital. Our results suggest that investment was typically driven by adverse demand rather than supply conditions on the capital market during the most severe recessions.     

昭平 这方升腾希望的土地

昭平,位于广西壮族自治区东部的桂江中游,距桂林市约200公里,全县总面积3273平方公里,人口约40万人.     

Political Ambivalence vs. Economic Rectitude

Pressures from bureaucracy and voters alide for disbursements from the 'public' purse carry much more political force than the desire to reduce government expenditure. Cecil Parkinson, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in 1963, Considers the interests in the formulation of spending plans and argues that the politicion willpuf political feasibility before economic desiderato.     

选美与股市

“股市和选美之间的关系是什么?在选美比赛里,个人长相很重要,别人的意见更重要。在股票市场上,不仅仅能拥有它的现金流,更重要的是拥有卖出的权利。我们在投资时同样需要知道其他人对股票的预期。”     

粉煤灰层沉井施工技术

文章以大唐耒阳发电厂灰坝辐射井工程为例,针对粉煤灰层的特殊物理性能对沉井施工技术进行了较为系统的探讨。     

手机:暗战恋战乱战

回顾中国整个手机市场的发展历程,大致可以分为摩托罗拉时代、三足鼎立时代和百花齐放时代等三个主要时代.……     

道德投资和邪恶投资对比研究

社会责任投资,又称道德投资,近年来受到了各界关注,一些机构纷纷成立道德基金进行投资。但另一方面,有人反其道而行之成立邪恶投资基金,专门投资道德投资排除在外的烟酒、军火、博彩等被认为缺乏社会责任的行业。基于常用的基金绩效对比指标-Sharpe指标和Jensen指标的实证显示,邪恶基金的表现优于传统基金和道德投资基金。因此,要持续得当投资者关注和青睐,道德投资还得从营销、法律约束等其它方面吸引投资者。     

土地制度改革与城市化发展

土地承包责任制带动了农村的发展,乡镇企业带动了农村非农经济的发展。中国农村的改革过程与土地制度变革密不可分。随着改革进程的推进,土地制度变革涉及宏观经济的内容越来越多,最直接的就是财政体制改革     

Structural vs. atheoretic approaches to econometrics

In this paper I attempt to lay out the sources of conflict between the so-called “structural” and “experimentalist” camps in econometrics. Critics of the structural approach often assert that it produces results that rely on too many assumptions to be credible, and that the experimentalist approach provides an alternative that relies on fewer assumptions. Here, I argue that this is a false dichotomy. All econometric work relies heavily on a priori assumptions. The main difference between structural and experimental (or “atheoretic”) approaches is not in the number of assumptions but the extent to which they are made explicit.     

6西格玛管理系列讲座(十一)6西格玛管理与其他管理方法和管理体系

在推动6西格玛管理实施的过程中,在如何处理6西格玛管理与其他管理体系和管理方法的关系方面,人们普遍存在一些困惑或疑问。其中疑问最多或最大的有以下几点:     

Contests with investment

Perfectly discriminating contests (all pay auctions) are widely used as a model of situations where individuals devote resources to win some prize. In reality such contests are often preceded by investments of the contestants into their ability to fight in the contest. This paper studies a two stage game where in the first stage, players can invest to lower their bid cost in a perfectly discriminating contest, which is played in the second stage. Different assumptions on the timing of investment are studied. With simultaneous investments, equilibria in which players play a pure strategy in the investment stage are asymmetric, exhibit incomplete rent dissipation, and expected effort is reduced relative to the game without investment. There also are symmetric mixed strategy equilibria with complete rent dissipation. With sequential investment, the first mover always invests enough to deter the second mover from investing, and enjoys a first mover advantage. I also look at unobservable investments and endogenous timing of investments. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Product Innovation Incentives: Monopoly vs. Competition

In contrast to Arrow's result for process innovations, we show that the gain from a product innovation can be larger to a secure monopolist than to a rivalrous firm that would face competition from independent sellers of the old product. A monopolist incurs profit diversion from its old good but may gain more than a rivalrous firm on the new good by coordinating the prices. In a Hotelling framework, we find simple conditions for the monopolist's gain to be larger. We also explain why the ranking of innovation incentives differs under vertical product differentiation.     

Open Society: Hayek vs. Popper?

Does an open open society require a free market? Dr Naomi Moldoisky of the University of Melbourne reinforces Hayek's insistence that free societies must rest on free markets.