IMF Bank-Restructuring Efficiency Outcomes: Evidence from East Asia

We report new findings on bank efficiency in East Asian countries for the pre- and post-IMF restructuring periods. We find that bank efficiency has improved, but only to the pre-IMF intervention level, and that restructured banks are not more efficient than their unrestructured counterparts. Different restructuring measures have different effects. Bank closures are economically justified, but mergers show short-term efficiency losses. Recapitalization and reprivatization of badly performing banks lead to efficiency improvement, but also increase government ownership. Ease of entry that has allowed for more foreign bank participation results in slightly improved performance of badly performing banks.

Optimal dividend policy and growth option

We analyse the interaction between the dividend policy and the decision on investment in a growth opportunity of a liquidity constrained firm. This leads us to study a mixed singular control/optimal stopping problem for a diffusion that we solve quasi-explicitly by establishing a connection with an optimal stopping problem. We characterize situations where it is optimal to postpone the distribution of dividends in order to invest at a subsequent date in the growth opportunity. We show that uncertainty and liquidity shocks have an ambiguous effect on the investment decision.      

Co-creation of value — towards an expanded paradigm of value creation

Co-creation is the process by which products, services, and experiences are developed jointly by companies and their stakeholders, opening up a whole new world of value. Firms must stop thinking of individuals as mere passive recipients of value, to whom they have traditionally delivered goods, services, and experiences. Instead, firms must seek to engage people as active co-creators of value everywhere in the system.     

Teaming up to Innovate: The Importance of a Joint Knowledge Base

Companies are increasingly discovering the potential of collaborating with others to create innovative products — often across industries — by combining their specializations in a unique way. A pre-condition for the success of these ventures is to build a common knowledge base, usually by duplicating selected parts of the partner’s knowledge. In this article, a case study and a quantitative study seek to elaborate on the unanswered question: Which building blocks constitute a common knowledge base?     

Antecedents of employee involvement with the comparative model

Instead of discussing employee’s performance that previous researchers emphasized in their studies on the work behavior of employees, this study analyzes employee involvement from the viewpoint of their emotional labor, organizational culture, and the intimacy relationships between employees and their supervisors. Large-scale financial holding conglomerates in Taiwan and subsidiaries of Hong Kong-based conglomerates were selected as the populations for the research. The result of the empirical analysis indicates that emotional labor has a significantly positive effect on the involvement of employees; the stronger the intimacy relationship between employees and their supervisors is, the higher the employee involvement will be, strong culture has a significantly negative effect on the involvement of employees, and there is a significant difference in a number of dimensions among some Chinese enterprises in Taiwan & Hong Kong. This study has the following characteristics in comparison with the previous studies: (1) The theoretical structure of this study is formed based on an integrated prospect of internal organizational structure, personal factors of employees and their interpersonal relationship; (2) the study focuses on a comparative study of regional enterprises, which was seldom emphasized in literature; (3) the study uses the Non-Linear Fuzzy Neural Network Model and multivariate analysis approach as tools for the research and may contribute more to the theory in this field.     

The deregulation of international trucking in the European Union: form and effect

We describe the regulatory regime under which international trucking operated in Western Europe until the mid-1980s, the deregulatory process that followed, and the effect of this deregulation. We find that deregulation had a large positive effect on the growth of international trucking. We also find that shippers shifted toward more outsourcing of their trucking needs, but this occurred to an even greater extent in local and national road transport. We conclude that other factors beside the deregulation of international trucking affected the organization of the industry at the time. Finally, despite concerns voiced by member countries, we find no evidence that deregulation disproportionately favored carriers of countries that were initially more (or less) involved in international trucking, nor that it has favored low-wage countries.