The relevance of the invoicing currency in intra-firm trade transactions

This paper extends the invoicing currency literature to the theory of multinational firms. Even with strong tax credit provisions net payments and receipts associated with intra-firm trade usually do not consolidate to zero. The statistical behavior of the resulting transactional value is affected by the decision on the invoicing currency. Thus, a carefully chosen invoicing currency can create foreign exchange exposure which offsets some other risks of the firm. The paper examines how and under what conditions this insight is relevant to a risk-averse multinational enterprise. A preliminary empirical study generates evidence which supports our ideas.     

服务型领导供求匹配一致性与创造力：内在动机与主动性人格的作用

服务型领导有效性取决于领导者和下属双方匹配的一致性,但现有研究局限于仅从领导或下属单一视角考察服务型领导的影响。基于个体-环境匹配理论,对服务型领导供求匹配一致性与创造力的关系进行分析,探讨追随者内在动机的中介作用与追随者主动性人格的调节作用。通过对200个领导与726个员工的配对数据进行多项式回归与响应面分析,结果发现：与服务型领导低匹配（低供给-低需求）相比,追随者的内在动机在服务型领导高匹配（高供给-高需求）时更高;服务型领导供求匹配通过追随者内在动机影响创造力;追随者主动性人格在服务型领导供求匹配与追随者内在动机之间并不存在显著调节作用。     

Work–Family Effects of Servant Leadership: The Roles of Emotional Exhaustion and Personal Learning

This study examined how servant leadership influences employees in terms of work-to-family conflict (WFC) and work-to-family positive spillover (WFPS). These effects were explored through a focus on the mediating roles of emotional exhaustion and personal learning. The results, which were based on time-lagged data collection in China, indicated that employee perceptions of servant leadership related negatively to WFC and positively to WFPS. Moreover, reduced emotional exhaustion and enhanced personal learning mediated the relationship between servant leadership and WFPS. Furthermore, reduced emotional exhaustion (but not enhanced personal learning) mediated the relationship between servant leadership and WFC. Our study’s results provide insightful theoretical and managerial implications and offer new directions for research on leadership and work–family relations.     

Contrarian investment strategies work better for dually-traded stocks: Evidence from Hong Kong

We investigate the profitability of contrarian investment strategies for equities listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX), which are separated into cross-listed firms and firms listed only in Hong Kong. We also investigate the relationship between stock returns and past trading volume for these equities. We report significantly higher contrarian profits for the period investigated and find that this is a persistent feature of stock returns for cross-listed companies. We also document that contrarian portfolios earn returns as high as 8.01% per month for the dually-traded companies and just 1.83% for only HKEX-listed firms. We find that volume has only a limited ability to explain contrarian profits. All extreme profits disappeared after adjusting for the Fama and French three-factor model.     

Supply chain scheduling and coordination with dual delivery modes and inventory storage cost

We study a two-echelon supply chain scheduling problem in which a manufacturer acquires supplies from an upstream supplier and processes orders from the downstream retailers. The supply chain sells a single short-life product in a single season. We consider the scenario where the manufacturer can only accept some of the orders from the retailers due to its supplier's common production time window and its own two common production and delivery time windows. The upstream supplier processes materials and delivers the semi-finished products to the manufacturer within its time window. Then the manufacturer further processes these products to produce finished products and delivers them to the retailers within its two time windows, where one window is for production and normal delivery, and the other is for production and express delivery. Having to store the materials before processing them, the supplier incurs a storage cost, which depends on the order size and storage time. The manufacturer pays the transportation cost for delivering the finished products to the retailers. Due to double marginalization, the performance of the supply chain is sub-optimal. We model the supply chain problem as a flow shop scheduling problem with multiple common time windows. We derive some dominance properties and establish some theorems that help solve the sequencing problems for the orders and eliminate the idle time among the orders. Based on these results, we develop fast pseudo-polynomial dynamic algorithms to optimally solve the problem. We prove that the problem is NP-hard in the ordinary sense only. We develop two practically relevant and robust methods for the supply chain to achieve optimal profit-making performance through channel coordination.     

The impact of contextual factors on the efficacy of ISO 9000 adoption

This study investigates the importance of contextual factors on the efficacy of ISO 9000 adoption. We explore the role of various contextual factors at the firm-level (i.e., technology intensity, labor productivity, and labor intensity) and industry-level (i.e., industry efficiency level, industry competitiveness, industry sales growth, and industry ISO 9000 adoption level) that potentially impact the efficacy of ISO 9000 adoption. We carry out a hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis based on objective financial data from 438 U.S. manufacturing firms. The results show that firms with low technology intensity, low labor productivity and high labor intensity reap more benefit from ISO 9000 adoption. Firms in industries with low efficiency levels, high competition, high sales growth and low ISO 9000 adoption levels also obtain more benefit from the adoption. Our research provides supporting evidence for the context-dependent proposition of ISO 9000 adoption. Given the significant costs and resources involved, it is crucial for operations managers to assess to what extent ISO 9000 might benefit their performance before embarking on the implementation process.     

Public enterprise governance

Abstract

Public enterprise management displays unique inherent tensions between its ‘publicness’ and ‘enterprise’ elements. The complex dynamics between these two sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting notions in managing a public enterprise can be interpreted with the aid of the concepts of governance. Public enterprise governance can be understood in terms of the dynamics among actors from the state, market and civil society in governing and managing collective affairs, each of very different values, norms and logics. This article introduces an analytical framework using the concepts of governance and public enterprises, and applies it to the wholly government-owned railway corporation, Kowloon – Canton Railway Corporation (KCRC) in Hong Kong. The KCRC can be regarded as commercially successful but this profitable public corporation has been plagued with many public governance controversies in its twenty-year history. Lessons from three major cases (the golden handshake affair, Long Valley saga and Siemens fiasco) are discussed.