Employee Representation and Consultative Voice in Multinational Companies Operating in Britain

Multinational companies (MNCs) from different countries of origin are widely held to have distinct preferences regarding the presence of employee representative structures and the form that employee 'voice' over management decisions takes. Such preferences are said to derive from the national models that prevail in the different countries of origin in which MNCs are based. Findings from a large-scale survey of the UK operations of MNCs indicate that country-of-origin influences on patterns of employee representation and emphasis on direct or indirect channels of employee 'voice' are attenuated by other factors, notably sector and method of growth. They also reveal significant recent innovation in representation and voice arrangements by this key group of employers.     

The relative efficiency of commodity futures markets

The ability of futures markets to predict subsequent spot prices has been a controversial topic for a number of years. Empirical evidence to date is mixed; for any given market, some studies find evidence of efficiency, others of inefficiency. In part, these apparently conflicting findings reflect differences in the time periods analyzed and the methods chosen for testing. A limitation of existing tests is the classification of markets as either efficient or inefficient with no assessment of the degree to which efficiency is present. This article presents tests for unbiasedness and efficiency across a range of commodity and financial futures markets, using a cointegration methodology, and develops a measure of relative efficiency. In general, the findings suggest that spot and futures prices are cointegrated with a slope coefficient that is close to unity, so that the postulated long-run relationship is accepted. However, there is evidence that the long-run relationship does not hold in the short run; specifically, changes in the spot price are explained by lagged differences in spot and futures prices as well as by the basis. This suggests that market inefficiencies exist in the sense that past information can be used by agents to predict spot price movements. A measure of the relative degree of inefficiency (based on forecast error variances) is then used to compare the performance of different markets. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 413–432, 1999     

《高兴》关于理想、善良与生活

没看过《高兴》的人,一定会把它与《疯狂的石头》或者《大电影2．0》相提并论,原因是这几部片子男一号为同一人,更重要的是扮演的都是特把生活当回事儿、特别认真生活的人。都是小人物的小事儿,都把小事当大事在做,都采用大众耳熟能详的形式演绎另类生活。     

Family Business Succession in Hong Kong: The Case of Yung Kee

This case study examines the succession of Chinese family business in Hong Kong, drawing upon theories of the firm. More specifically, it utilizes capabilities theories, property rights economics and Neo-Confucianism to understand management disputes and infighting among the members in a Chinese family business in Hong Kong. This paper will argue that the founder of a Chinese business firm in Hong Kong is able to lead his or her offspring to create a dynamic enterprise via charismatic leadership and family rules embedded in traditional Chinese values. However, these two strategic assets disappear following the passing away of the founder as well as the emergence of new social values. When the founder passes on the enterprise to his or her offspring using more or less the equal inheritance system, the traditional Chinese value is unable to enforce the leader’s will to consolidate the strengths of the second generation family members to maintain the founder’s business. Furthermore, when the business is owned by all family members, property rights of the firm become unclear. Without effective enforcement of traditional Chinese values and with collective ownership rights, some family members will have the incentive to capture the economic rent that is shared by all members. In other words, some family members behave opportunistically or even cheat in order to capture economic gains in the public domain. High monitoring and enforcement costs in the form of court battle and endless disputes will occur. Rent dissipation occurs in the form of deterioration of the quality of the family business. This case study is based on Yung Kee, an internationally well-known roast goose restaurant in Hong Kong as an illustration.     

UK Accountants' Perceptions of Research Journal Quality

The process of research quality assessment is now firmly established in UK universities. The quality of the journals in which academic papers are published is an important input to the assessment process. The relative quality of these journals is clearly difficult to establish in an objective manner. This paper contributes to the debate about relative quality by conducting a peer review. Eighty-eight UK accounting academics reported their degree of familiarity with, and perceptions of quality of, a total of 44 journals in the accounting and finance discipline. Accounting and Business Research and theBritish Accounting Review were the two most familiar academic journals. The most highly ranked journals were generally from the US.     

Financial liberalization and bank efficiency: a comparative analysis of India and Pakistan

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of the technical efficiency of commercial banks in India and Pakistan during 1988–1998, a period characterized by far-reaching changes in the banking industry brought about by financial liberalization. Data Envelopment Analysis is applied to two alternative input–output specifications to measure technical efficiency, and to decompose technical efficiency into its two components, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency. The consistency of the estimated efficiency scores are checked by examining their relationship with three traditional non-frontier measures of bank performance. In addition, the relationship between bank size and technical efficiency is examined. It is found that the overall technical efficiency of the banking industry of both countries improved gradually over the years, especially after 1995. Unlike public sector banks in India, public sector banks in Pakistan witnessed improvement in scale efficiency only. It is also found that banks are relatively more efficient in generating earning assets than in generating income. This is attributed to the presence of high non-performing loans. In addition, it is found that the gap between the pure technical efficiency of different size groups has declined over the years.     

Explaining peak inflation rates prior to disinflationary policy adjustments or what got us into this mess?

This study investigates, using annual data from 1974–2004, whether unionization rates, trade openness and central bank independence can help explain cross-national and inter-temporal variations in level of peak inflation prior to a disinflationary policy adjustment. I find that unionization is positively associated with both peak inflation rates whereas more independent central banks and trade openness are correlated with lower inflation levels. These results are robust to controlling for the high inflation decade of the 1970s and to using average (rather than peak) inflation as the explanatory variable.