Measuring the Performance of Banks

Banks do not publish accounts in quite the same way as other companies, and nor should they. But they should not be immune to conventional standards of performance ranking and evaluation. This companion piece to Business Strategy Review articles on measuring company performance applies some performance benchmarking to a sample of European Banks. The result: they must do better.     

Migrant wages,remittances and recipient labour supply in a moral hazard model

This paper analyzes the interaction between migrants’ income and remittances and between remittances and the labour supply of residents. The model is cast as a two-period game with imperfect information about the residents’ real economic situation. Residents subject to a good economic situation may behave as if they were in a poor economic situation only in order to manipulate remitters’ expectations. The latter, being aware of this risk, reduce the remitted amount accordingly. Therefore, in the equilibrium, residents who really are victims of the bad economic outlook are penalized as compared to the perfect information set-up. In some circumstances, they can signal their type by drastically cutting working hours, thus further enhancing their precarity right when their economic situation is the worst.     

Employment forecasts neglected by local authorities

The Structure Plans recently produced by 40 local authorities in England and Wales were searched for references to possible future developments concerning employment. The three general conclusions are that they make few forecasts; when they do forecast, they usually assume a continuation of past trends and/or are quite optimistic; and little has been learnt from past failures to anticipate important developments.     

The measurement and recognition of intangible assets: then and now

“In the Fortune 500 there are thousands upon thousands of statistics that reveal very little that’s meaningful about the corporations they purportedly describe. At least that’s the verdict of a growing number of forward-thinking market watchdogs, academics, accountants, and others.”(Fortune, April 2001). In today’s economy value is often created by intangible (intellectual) capital. The accounting profession has not met the challenge of measuring and reporting the results of knowledge-based entities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimates that in the year 2000 more than US$ 1 trillion was invested in Intangibles. The problems relating to the measurement and recognition of intangibles are international in scope.This paper reviews existing and recently promulgated US, UK, and IASC accounting standards relating to Intangibles. Inconsistencies in the measurement and reporting of Intangibles under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are highlighted, and evidence is provided that suggests that recognition of Intangible (Intellectual) Capital is in accordance with existing accounting principles In particular, the newly promulgated Financial Accounting Standards Statements on Business Combinations, Goodwill, and other Intangibles is reviewed. The objective of the comparisons to UK and IASC standards and the review is to provide evidence that will improve the measurement and reporting of intangible (intellectual) capital and facilitate harmonization. Improving the global financial reporting infrastructure will ultimately lead to the reporting of relevant and reliable quality earnings.     

One Kind of Freedom: Poverty Dynamics in Post-apartheid South Africa

A 1993 South African living standards survey documented the legacy of apartheid in the form high levels of inequality and human insecurity. Drawing on a 1998 re-survey of households in the 1993 study, this paper explores whether this legacy has been superseded, or whether apartheid's end has been only one kind of freedom that has left households in a poverty trap from which they cannot escape. After proposing a theoretically grounded dynamic poverty typology that distinguishes stochastic from structural poverty transitions, the paper goes on to estimate that significant numbers of the South African poor are potentially trapped in a structural poverty trap and lack the means to escape poverty over time.     

An International Perspective of Online Disclosure Presentation: A Comparison of Banner Ad Disclosures from United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore Web Sites

Effective online disclosure presentation is an important feature in banner advertising worldwide. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is viewed as the leader in providing guidance for making disclosures clear and conspicuous. This study examines the extent to which banner ads in the top 100 web sites in three countries with a shared language and intertwining legal and self-regulatory systems—the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore—adhere to FTC guidance. The lack of systematic differences across countries suggests the need for disclosure research from a global perspective that takes cultural and linguistic differences into account.     

Above board? Interlocking directorates and corporate contagion in 1980s Australia

The 1980s were an outrageous time in Australia's business history. This paper re-examines this era of misconduct, assessing the role of interlocking directorates for corporate governance of diversified business groups. Professional interlocked executives—those with professional training, executive status and mobility between member firms—enabled the takeover culture of the time, and allowed managers to ignore promised strategic benefits and redirect associated firms towards speculative share ownership. These results demonstrate the importance of board independence for corporate governance, and the way that expertise has been weaponised within managerial capitalism to encourage trust in risky and exploitative corporate structures.     

Consumer involvement in health research: a UK scoping and survey

Consumer involvement or patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research is a UK policy imperative and a prerequisite for many funders. PPI in research is defined as research carried out with or being carried out by the public (or service users), rather than research on patients and public as subjects or participants. Despite the clear policy driver, there is relatively little empirical evidence on the extent, processes and impact of user involvement in research. This paper aims to add to the international evidence base on PPI in research by providing a key overview of current trends and impacts. In order to understand the current extent and variation of PPI in research, a scoping exercise and survey were carried out on selected UK studies. Six research topic areas (cystic fibrosis, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and public health) were selected to ensure a range of designs, study populations and histories of PPI in research. A total of 838 studies (non‐commercial studies and not older than 2 years) were contacted. The response rate for the scoping was 38% and the survey 28%. In the scoping, 51% of studies had some evidence of PPI and in the survey 79%. The most common PPI activity was steering committee membership and reviewing patient information leaflets. There appeared to be some blurred roles with patients participating as research subjects as well as carrying out patient involvement roles. A major finding was the limited amount of available information about PPI in publicly accessible research documents. We suggest that the invisibility of this type of involvement and the lack of routinely collected information about PPI results in a lack of shared understanding of what optimal PPI in a study should look like, with important implications for practice. Furthermore, without a framework to review PPI it is difficult to know if different approaches to PPI have a different impact on key outcomes of the research.     

Costly external finance,reallocation, and aggregate productivity

Empirical studies document that resource reallocation across production units plays an important role in accounting for aggregate productivity growth in the US manufacturing. Financial market frictions could distort the reallocation process and hence may hinder aggregate productivity growth. This paper studies the quantitative impact of costly external finance on aggregate productivity through resource reallocation across firms with idiosyncratic productivity shocks. A partial equilibrium model calibrated to the US manufacturing data shows that costly external finance causes inefficient output reallocation from high productivity firms to low productivity firms and as a result leads to a 1 percent loss in aggregate TFP.