Credit Rationing,Customer Relationship and the Number of Banks: an Empirical Analysis

The recent important transformations of the banking sector, especially through numerous mergers and acquisitions, both in Europe and in the USA, have raised serious concerns for the financing of small businesses (SBS). Indeed, SBS are known to be heavily dependent of this financing channel but to be rather opaque. It has long been thought that banks classically solved this problem by developing long term customer relationships. But will the new large banks, born from the current restructuring process, be able to continue to play this role? If not, what strategy should SBS develop to compose their bank pool in order to avoid, as much as possible, credit rationing? These questions are at the heart of our analysis. We show that there is no unique rule: all depends on the degree of SBS opacity and the kind of bank the SBS are working with.     

Knowledge Stocks and Information Flows in New Product Development*

Although firms increasingly invest in systems (e.g. ISO, knowledge centres, IT systems) for utilizing stored knowledge and acquiring market information during new product development, few manage to benefit from these investments. To explore this issue, we suggest that firms rely on two distinct types of knowledge stocks– procedural and declarative memory – that affect new product short‐term financial performance and creativity in distinct ways. Additionally, we suggest that internal or external information flows can have distinct moderating impact on the memory types–product outcomes relationship. Our empirical study of product development activities indicates that there is an inverted U‐shaped relationship between procedural memory and product outcomes as well as a positive relationship between declarative memory and financial performance. Also procedural and declarative memory may work in a complementary fashion enhancing both outcomes. Finally, procedural memory is found to reduce the value of internal or external information flows for product creativity. These findings have important implications for the organizational knowledge, capabilities, and product development literatures as well as for practice and they open ways for future research.     

Enlarging and/or deepening the community

Developments in Eastern Europe have forced the EC to reconsider its goal of European union. German reunification and the end of East-West conflict and the division of Europe have given rise to two antagonistic schools of thought. One argues in favour of strengthened integration in order to accommodate a united Germany in the EC; the other implies an opening up of the EC to those countries wishing to join the Twelve. In order to pass beyond the enlargement/deepening dilemma the EC has attempted to implement a strategy whose success is still uncertain. The debate over enlargement is highlighting differences of opinion between and within member states over the objectives of European union.     

Hybrid Choice Models: Progress and Challenges

We discuss the development of predictive choice models that go beyond the random utility model in its narrowest formulation. Such approaches incorporate several elements of cognitive process that have been identified as important to the choice process, including strong dependence on history and context, perception formation, and latent constraints. A flexible and practical hybrid choice model is presented that integrates many types of discrete choice modeling methods, draws on different types of data, and allows for flexible disturbances and explicit modeling of latent psychological explanatory variables, heterogeneity, and latent segmentation. Both progress and challenges related to the development of the hybrid choice model are presented.     

Urban household behavior in a model of completely centralized employment

The following results are obtained from an urban residential model of completely centralized employment, first expounded by Richard Muth: Housing price falls at a decreasing numerical rate with distance from the CBD; the CBD-employed household's housing consumption and location (distance from the CBD) are positively related to preferences for housing, but negatively related to housing price (level and rate of decline with distance) and transportation costs (level, rate of increase with distance, and rate of increase with value-of-time). Some of these results are new and others are generalizations, corrections, or clarifications of Muth's original results.     

Monitoring Accounts Payables

In creating shareholder value, one objective of management is to increase the speed of cash inflows and reduce the speed of cash outflows. To accomplish this task, management must understand the relationships that cause accounts receivable and accounts payable to change. The paper expands a receivable monitoring model by Gentry and De La Garza to incorporate the causes of changes in payables. Several examples are developed to show the operation of the model. The three primary contributions of the paper are (a) developing algorithms that measure the causes of changes in payables, plus an interpretation for each set of conditions; (b) showing that a present value approach to monitoring payables is superior to a recommended accounting approach based on variance analysis; (c) finally, presenting an approach for ranking the performance of payable and receivable strategies.