Pathways to Success in M&A

For many if not most publicly traded companies, acquisition capabilities remain a critical component of sustainable longterm growth and profitability. And even as investors press companies to return excess capital through dividends and stock buybacks, the market continues to assign premium valuations to companies that earn above-average returns through a combination of internal investment and judicious acquisition spending.
This article begins by describing major challenges facing acquirers in the current business and regulatory environment. Then, after showing how M&A can be used to address strategic goals, the authors identify key elements in the M&A strategies of three highly successful companies: General Electric, Danaher, and Illinois Tool Works.     

Diamonds Are a Rebel's Best Friend

Many countries that produce rough diamonds have experienced a highly adverse pattern of economic development. In this article, we propose that the primary reason for the negative impact is that diamonds easily become the prize in predatory struggles between loot‐seeking rebels and more or less kleptocratic governments. In weakly institutionalised countries like Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone, this theory works well, but it does not explain the impressive growth record of diamond‐rich Botswana and Namibia. For a deeper understanding of these countries’ success, we point at the crucial differences between kimberlite and alluvial mining and the effect of having the world‐leading firm De Beers as a partner. Indeed, we argue that in countries like Angola, diamonds can never be a major vehicle for sustained growth, although the ongoing Kimberley process for eliminating conflict diamonds probably has contributed to making several African countries more stable.     

Asset Specificity and Vertical Integration

Asset specificity is usually considered to be an argument for vertical integration. The main idea is that specificity induces opportunistic behavior, and that vertical integration reduces the cost of preventing opportunism. In this paper I show that asset specificity can be an argument for non‐integration. In a repeated‐game model of self‐enforcing relational contracts, it is shown that when parties are non‐integrated, increasing degrees of asset specificity make it possible to design relational contracts with higher‐powered incentives.     

Pay Comparability Across and Within UK Boards: An Empirical Analysis of the Cash Pay Awards to CEOs and Other Board Members

Drawing on the literature on social comparison and equity theories, this paper analyses the determinants of, and the relationships between, the cash pay awards of CEOs and other board members for a sample of large UK companies over the period 1992–95. Our results suggest that external labour market and internal (i.e., within board) pay comparisons are important in explaining both CEO and other directors' pay awards. In the case of CEOs, however, there is evidence of an asymmetric adjustment to prior period pay anomalies, whereby the pay of the relatively underpaid executives displays significantly greater sensitivity to external market comparison pay levels. This asymmetric adjustment process results in a 'bidding-up' of average CEO pay relative to other board members over the four year period investigated.     

The economic costs of biological predation

This paper developes a bioeconomic model to analyse the economic losses from the reduced harvesting of prey species resulting from an increase in the stock of a natural predator. Examples of large mammals creating economic damage are whales and African elephants. The economic losses depend critically on the actual management of the prey stock, although the three measures we develop are equal when the stock is managed so as to maximize the sustained economic rent from the prey species. Predation losses are illustrated by the case of the Northeastern Atlantic Minke whale, where the estimate of the average predation cost per whale in 1991–1992 is between $US 1780 and $US 2370, using Norwegian cost and earnings data. A ten percent stock increase is estimated to cause a loss of almost $US 19 million to the fishers of the prey species. If half of this cost were assigned to Norway it would be equivalent to 2.8 and 6.7 percent of the gross profits of the Norwegian cod and herring fisheries, respectively.     

Credit rationing, interest rates and capital accumulation

A simple endogenous growth model is developed to characterize credit rationing through the capital accumulation process. The model shows that credit rationing on investment loans decreases as capital accumulates and the enforcement cost decreases. We find that the evolution of the interest rate factor (lending interest rate/depositing interest rate) has a similar pattern to the credit rationing probability. However, simulations show that the evolution of the interest rate spread through the capital accumulation process depends on the degree of the enforcement cost. In the empirical part of the paper, we consider fifty-two countries, at different stages of development, over the period 1995–2005. We confirm the theoretical findings relative to the evolution of the interest rate spread and interest rate factor with capital accumulation. These results suggest that, for economies endowed with costly contract enforcement, the interest rate factor could be a better proxy of credit rationing than the interest rate spread.     

Revisiting constraints to smallholder participation in high-value markets: A best-worst scaling approach

We show how policymakers in developing regions can generate richer insights from using the choice experiment method best-worst scaling (BWS) method when ranking policy priorities on an importance scale. More specifically, we adopt BWS to provide an update on constraints that limit the participation of Kenyan horticultural smallholder farmers in modern agricultural value chains. In addition to traditional constraints posed by input market failures and missing institutions, we considered constraints such as trust and familiarity with buyers shown by recent empirical studies to inform smallholders’ market choices. Ascertaining the relevance of these constraints highlights our contribution to the existing literature. We find that farmers consistently rate access to high-quality inputs as their main constraint followed by concerns about access to credit, the high cost of meeting food standards, missing cooperatives, and exploitative intermediaries. Respondents considered insufficient labor, small farmlands, and weak tenure rights as the least important constraints. Age, location, gender, household income, and education influence the relative importance various segments of smallholders place on these constraints. For example, constraints are economic rather than personal for low-income farmers. Counterintuitively, rural smallholders are less likely to perceive poor transportation network as a constraint. Smallholders’ distrust of buyers they interact with is informed by their location and income. In designing intervention initiatives, policies that focus on segments of smallholders are needed for improving smallholder participation in modern agricultural value chains.     

The Multiplicity of Performance Management Systems: Heterogeneity in Multinational Corporations and Management Sense‐Making

This field study examines the workings of multiple performance measurement systems (PMSs) used within and between a division and Headquarters (HQ) of a large European corporation. We explore how multiple PMSs arose within the multinational corporation. We first provide a first‐order analysis which explains how managers make sense of the multiplicity and show how an organization's PMSs may be subject to competing processes for control that result in varied systems, all seemingly functioning, but with different rationales and effects. We then provide a second‐order analysis based on a sense‐making perspective that highlights the importance of retrospective understandings of the organization's history and the importance of various legitimacy expectations to different parts of the multinational. Finally, we emphasize the role of social skill in sense‐making that enables the persistence of multiple systems and the absence of overt tensions and conflict within organizations.     

Different Problem,Same Solution: Contract‐Specialization in Venture Capital

Real‐world financial contracts vary greatly in the combinations of cash flow contingency terms and control rights used. Extant theoretical work explains such variation by arguing that each investor finely tailors contracts to mitigate investment‐specific incentive problems. We provide overwhelming evidence from 4,561 venture capital (VC) contracts that this tailoring is overstated: even though there is broad variation in contracting across VCs, each individual VC tends to specialize, recycling familiar terms. In fact, a VC typically restricts contracting choices to a small set of alternatives: 46% of the time, a VC uses the same exact cash flow contingencies as in one of her previous five contracts. We document specialization in both aggregated downside protection, and in each individual cash flow contingency term. Such specialization remains economically and statistically significant even after controlling for VC and company characteristics. We also find that VCs learn to use new contractual solutions from other VCs in her syndication network. Our findings challenge the traditional premise that each investor selects from the universe of combinations of terms to match an investment's unique contracting problem. Rather, the cumulative evidence indicates that contract‐specialization arises because investors better understand payoff consequences of familiar terms, and are reluctant to experiment with unknown combinations.     

When to accept a sequence of gambles

When is a sequence of gambles, which is initially rejected eventually accepted? The eventual acceptance is defined as a pair property between the utility function and the sequences of gambles. A sequence of gambles is accepted when the gambles follow a large deviation principle and the utility function is non-satiated and bounded from below in a certain way. The number of gambles required for acceptance is computed.