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Banks do not publish accounts in quite the same way as other companies, and nor should they.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.     

Are U.S. Companies Really Holding That Much Cash—And If So,Why?

Non‐financial S&P 500 companies are now estimated to hold a total of $2.1 trillion of “cash,” a figure that is larger than the annual GDP of all but eight countries. In this report, J.P. Morgan's Corporate Finance Advisory team notes that while many observers have attributed the buildup to offshore cash growth alone, onshore cash levels are also up significantly. To be sure, the companies that have shown the greatest increases also tend to be highly successful, with strong cash flow and business performance. And the managers of such companies tend to prefer to retain much if not most of this cash to take advantage of investment opportunities and to maintain the flexibility to respond to the next economic downturn. Also adding to the cash build‐ups, the executives of large MNCs with significant overseas cash holdings typically try to avoid the higher tax bill triggered by repatriating funds to the U.S. Nevertheless, investors continue to expect growth and high returns on capital; and corporate distributions of capital in the form of dividends and stock buybacks can play an important role in encouraging companies to operate efficiently. While pursuing both of these goals—preservation of enough cash to weather downturns and invest in all positive‐NPV projects, and commitment to paying out excess capital—boards and senior decision makers should continuously reexamine their cash holdings and capital allocation policies to ensure they are appropriate not only for today's environment, but throughout the economic cycle.     

High quality positioning and the success of reputable products

It has become almost a conventional wisdom that high quality is an essential route to high profits. In this article Evan Davis shows that the truth is likely to be more complicated. The large profits that accrue to high quality producers are usually rewarding some inimitable production skill, or are reflecting the faith that customers have in the reputation of the producer to deliver a quality product in a market where quality is hard to monitor. For producers that do not have special skills, or who have no easy means of acquiring a reputation, the benefits of high quality positioning may not be great.     

Post–World War Two industry policy: opportunities and constraints

There exists an entrenched conventional wisdom that, for the first seventy years of the twentieth century, Australia was closed to the global economy in the pursuit of an inward–looking and market–defying approach to development. This interpretation is neglectful of the broad forces at work and their evolution. The economic policy process inevitably embodies compromise between conflicting views and interests, including bureaucratic rivalries. An investigation of the role and treatment of the post–War industry bureaucracy provides some insight into the character of the contemporary balance of forces. Post–War development certainly involved dysfunctionalities, but the causes were located in a complex set of determinants rooted in culture rather than just inwardness or rent seeking. Thus, the importance of the protective tariff for the manufacturing sector in the 1960s deserves to be reinterpreted as a symptom rather than the cause of any underlying problems with policy character and policy priorities.     

Multidimensional skills and the returns to schooling: Evidence from an interactive fixed-effects approach and a linked survey-administrative data set

This paper presents new evidence on returns to schooling based on an interactive fixed-effects framework that allows for multiple unobserved skills with potentially time-varying prices as well as individual-level heterogeneity in returns. This constitutes a substantive generalization of most existing approaches. Our empirical analysis employs a unique linked survey-administrative panel data set on education and earnings. We find average marginal returns to schooling of about 2.8–4.4% relative to least squares/instrumental variable estimates between 7.7% and 12.7%. Omitted ability accounts for a larger fraction of the aggregate least squares bias compared to heterogeneity. We also find considerable heterogeneity in individual returns.     

WEB-IS (integrated system): an overall view

WEB-IS, Web-based Integrated System, allows remote, interactive visualization of large-scale 3-D data over the Internet, along with data analysis and data mining. In this paper, we discuss the overall structure of WEB-IS. Up until now we have developed three sub-modules geared towards geophysical problems. WEB-IS1 allows geoscientists to navigate through their 3-D geophysical data, such as seismic structures or numerical simulations, and interactively analyze the statistics or apply data-mining techniques, such as cluster analysis. WEB-IS2 lets a user control Amira (a powerful 3-D visualization package) remotely and analyze, render and view large datasets across the Internet. WEB-IS3 is an imaging service that enables the user to control the scale of features to view through interactive zooming. In the near future, we propose to integrate the three components together through a middleware framework called NaradaBrokering (iNtegrated Asynchronous Real-time Adaptive Distributed Architecture, a distributed messaging infrastructure that can be used to intelligently route data between the originators and registered consumers) without regard for time or location. As a result, WEB-IS will improve its scalability and acquire properties of fault-tolerance. WEB-IS uses a combination of Java, C++, and through the use of NaradaBrokering will seamlessly integrate the server-side processing and user interaction utilities on the client. The server takes care of the processor intensive tasks, such as visualization and data mining, and sends either the resulting bitmap image or statistical results to the middleware across the Internet for viewing. WEB-IS is an easy-to-use service, which will eventually help geoscientists collaborate from different sites in a natural manner. It will be very useful in the next 10 years because of the increasing number of space missions and geophysical campaigns.     

Inertial linkages between wages and inflation: Evidence from Brazil

Many observers of the Brazilian economy have suggested that wage growth causes inflation. Because wage growth is linked to past price growth, an inertial component is said to exist. The relationship between wage growth and inflation in Brazil over the period 1981–89 is examined. A model of wage growth and inflation is developed. Lagged effects of inflation on wage growth and a structural break in 1986 are tested for. The estimates suggest a lagged response of wages to prices in the pre-1986 period. However, in the post-1986 period, the response of wages to lagged inflation is not statistically different from zero and the contemporaneous response is not different from one.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at Fundacão Getulio Vargas and CEBRAP in São Paulo in August 1991. The author wishes to thank Tomàs Malaga, Carola Lame, Gesner Olivera, and Luis Bresser Periera for helpful comments. As well, the author wishes to acknowledge some critical input from Ann Witte and Alejandra Edwards. All errors, however, are the author's own.