Crafting a Human Resource Strategy to Foster Organizational Agility: A Case Study

A decade ago, the Chief Executive Officer of Albert Einstein Healthcare Network (AEHN), anticipating a tumultuous and largely unpredictable period in its industry, undertook to convert this organization from one that was basically stable and complacent to one that was agile, “nimble, and change‐hardy”. This case study, while briefly addressing AEHN's approaches to business strategy and organization design, focuses primarily on the human resource strategy that emerged over time to foster the successful attainment of organizational agility. Although exploratory, the study suggests a number of lessons for those who are—or will be—studying or trying to create and sustain this promising new organizational paradigm. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Information immobility,industry concentration,and institutional investors’ performance

This paper examines foreign institutional investors’ portfolio allocation and performance in US securities. We test how information immobility, proxied by information barriers between the investors’ home markets and the US, influences portfolio strategies. Consistent with theoretical predictions, foreign institutional investors’ total investment in the US is negatively related to information immobility. Similarly, information immobility is a significant driver of portfolio under-diversification across industries. Industry concentration has declined over time, consistent with declining search costs. Industry-concentrated portfolios outperform more diversified portfolios for both foreign and US institutional investors. Concentration especially helps institutional investors with the easiest access to information.     

Testing for shifts in variability

This paper embodies the views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia or of the Federal Reserve System.     

Conduct in a Banking Monopoly

Extending previous empirical work on concentrated markets, this paper appliesa Rosse–Panzar revenue test to quarterly data from a monopoly bank. The testrejects the hypotheses of static monopoly pricing or perfectly contestablepricing. Other tests suggest that the bank was in long-run equilibrium duringthe sample period and did not exhibit particular forms of expense-preferencebehavior. Possible interpretations of the bank's conduct include limit pricingto deter entry or an objective other than maximizing static profit. The resultsraise new questions about conduct among monopoly banks or in declining markets.     

Selective cost-reducing innovation

In the short run, capital-saving technological change may reduce fixed cost whereas labor-saving innovation reduces variable costs. It is shown that risk averse firms prefer the former type of innovation when facing random demand. Deterministic incentives for competitive firms are also discussed. This paper embodies the views of the authro and does not represent the views or policy of the Federal Reserve System or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The author is grateful for helpful comments from Robert Clower and an anonymous referee.     

Municipal Disclosure Timeliness and the Cost of Debt

A longstanding concern for municipal bond investors is the lack of timely financial statement disclosures. Municipalities are held to lower disclosure standards than corporations. Using continuing disclosure dates for audited financial statements, we find bond issuers with slower disclosure have higher secondary market yields and spreads, less frequent secondary market trading, and are less likely to issue new bonds. We observe that future disclosure is largely predictable based on past disclosure and that disclosure often improves prior to new bond issuances. When municipalities do not capitalize on the benefits of timely disclosure, economic consequences are imposed on bondholders and taxpayers.     

Repeated contests: A general parameterization

Contests often involve players vying for the same prize year after year. This paper characterizes equilibrium effort, both individual and aggregate, in a general parameterization of such repeated contests.