Growth Opportunities and Investment Decisions: A New Perspective on the Cost of Capital

This paper shows that it is not always correct to make an upward adjustment to the stock beta in calculating the hurdle rate for capital budgeting even when the project under consideration is riskier than existing assets. The paper also shows that the correct hurdle rate is smaller than the market capitalization rate calculated from the firm's stock beta when the project under consideration has the same risk as existing assets. In addition, it is shown that the market capitalization rate will be an underestimate (overestimate) of the correct hurdle rate when the risk of future assets is greater (smaller) than both the risk of assets in place and that of future capital expenditures. These new results are direct consequences of the insight that the firm's investment opportunities are in fact real call options written on underlying assets.     

全球国际收支失衡:欧洲的观点

我的论文是和J·von Hagen一起写的,只能代表两个欧洲人的看法.论文探讨全球失衡对于欧洲来说可能意味着什么,特别是恢复平衡对于欧洲来说意味着什么.     

Hope Springs Eternal - French Bondholders and the Soviet Repudiation (1915-1919)

Repudiations rarely occur due to their extreme nature. This paper provides an empirical study based on an original database: prices of a Tsarist bond traded in Paris before and after its repudiation by the Soviets. A structural VAR is used to disentangle French market shocks from repudiation specific ones. After the repudiation, we identify shocks that are related with bailouts, hopes of partial bailouts, negotiations with the Soviets and the Russian civil war. We argue that bond prices essentially reflected expected extreme events that never took place and were thus subject to a “Peso problem”.The authors thank Howard Bodenhorn, Michael Bordo, Frans Buelens, Ariane Chapelle, André Farber, Georges Gallais-Hamonno, Jean-Jacques Heirwegh, Marie-Paule Laurent, Larry Neal, Hugh Rockoff, Ariane Szafarz, Gail Triner, Andrey Ukhov, Loredana Ureche-Rangau, Daniel Waldenstr?m, Marc Weidenmier, Eugene White as well as the editor, William Goetzmann, an anonymous referee, the participants of the 2005 BETA workshop in historical economics and of the 2005 European Historical Economics Society Annual Conference for helpful comments. The first author also thanks M. Gallais-Hamonno and Ms. Bodilsen for their help and availability when collecting the data respectively at the Université d’Orléans and at the SBF.     

Exploring the ethical behavior of managers: A comparative study of four countries

Donaldson and Dunfee's (1994) social contracts theory of economic ethics was subjected to empirical scrutiny to determine whether it can explain differences in behavior between cultures. Data collected utilizing a series of vignettes developed by Fritzsche and Becker (1984) were examined for differences in indicated ethical behavior among American, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese managers. Rationale for the behavior was classified according to hyper and community norms which were supported or violated. The results suggest that the three East Asian countries do not neatly cluster together in relation to the U.S. in terms of their patterns of ethical behavior. Nonetheless, when we examined the specific rationale for the decisions provided by the managers, the effects of Asian cultural characteristics became more notable. We also found that the social contracts theory provided a much needed bridge between ethical universalists and relativists. The specific reasons underlying their decisions are discussed in the light of cultural and social differences.This research project was partially supported by a research grant from the School of Business and Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.     

The Effects of Consumption Variability on Saving: Evidence from a Panel of Muscovite Households**

Due to the high uncertainty characterizing them, transition economies provide an extraordinary opportunity to test the precautionary saving hypothesis. This paper represents an attempt to exploit this opportunity. We use a panel of 2,346 Muscovite households, over the 12 months of 1996, to construct two time‐varying measures of consumption growth variability, which we use as proxies for households’ perceived uncertainty. We then regress household saving on these uncertainty variables using a GMM‐system estimator. We find that both uncertainty measures generally have a positive and statistically significant effect on saving. This result, which is robust to the use of different measures of saving, supports the precautionary saving hypothesis.     

Strategies for successful organizational downsizing

This article reports the results of a study of 30 organizations that engaged in downsizing over a four-year period. Three questions were investigated: (1) What general strategies are used by organizations to downsize? (2) What are the effects of downsizing on organizational performance? (3) What are downsizing's “best practices?” or, What are the differences between organizations that effectively downsize and those that do not? Three main strategies for downsizing are explained, the managerial actions to overcome the negative effects of downsizing are enumerated, and the best practices of successful downsizing firms are presented.     

Flat priors vs. ignorance priors in the analysis of the AR(1) model

The paper compares, by a Monte-Carlo study based on an AR(1) model, the performance of the flat prior and the ignorance prior suggested by Phillips. It argues that the ignorance prior gives heavy weight to values of the autoregressive parameter p higher than 1, and hence distorts the sample evidence as summarized in the likelihood function. It yields bimodal posterior distributions, with the second mode at p higher than 1, even when the true value of p is substantially less than 1.     

The role of family conglomerates in emerging markets: What Western companies should know

Large, diversified, family‐owned businesses are dominant players in the economies of most emerging markets and can be excellent business partners for Western companies. This article highlights the evolutionary patterns of family conglomerates (FCs) and delineates principal drivers of their growth, expansion, and internationalization. Those aspects of FCs examined in this study include early mover advantages, foreign alliances, competitive market positioning, and diversification. Also discussed are entry‐mode considerations for Western companies contemplating doing business in the fast‐growth markets of East Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.