The performance of frequent acquirers: Evidence from emerging markets

This study examines the returns to 2340 merger deals conducted by 1122 frequent acquirers in 17 emerging markets, during the period 1985 to June 2008. Our primary findings are as follows. Serial acquirers in emerging countries on average experience a declining pattern in returns with subsequent deals, but the pattern is not strong. However, conditional on successful initial deals, the declining pattern is strong for the majority of countries, is large in terms of the magnitude, and is significant in the multivariate regression analysis. We interpret the results as somewhat supportive of the hubris behavior as a factor in serial acquisitions (Roll, J Business 59, 1986). We also find a stronger declining pattern for more developed markets but no substantial difference between civil and common-law countries; the former might be explained by generally greater and increasing competition for control in more developed markets.     

Corporate cash holdings and dividend payments: evidence from simultaneous analysis

This study explores the simultaneous relationship between corporate cash holdings and dividend policy using a large sample of around 400 non‐financial firms for the period from 1991 to 2008. The results show that cash holdings are affected by dividends, leverage, growth, size, risk, profitability, and working capital ratio. Dividend policy is affected by cash, leverage, growth, size, risk, and profit. When controlling for simultaneity, dividend payments do not appear to significantly affect cash holdings, nor do cash holdings affect dividend policy. The empirical analysis suggests that simultaneity is crucial in analyzing corporate cash holdings and dividend policy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Market Risk Disclosures and Investment Efficiency: International Evidence from the Gulf Cooperation Council Financial Firms

This study examines the association between market risk disclosures (MRDs) and the investment efficiency of financial firms from six emerging markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Based on a sample of 553 firm‐year observations over the 2007–2011 period, we find that MRDs are significantly and negatively associated with both under‐investment and over‐investment and that this association is more pronounced for larger firms. We also find that the association between MRDs and under‐investment is moderated during periods of economic distress such as the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and that the association between MRDs and over‐investment is magnified during periods of reduced financial distress. Our results are consistent with the idea that MRDs reduce information asymmetry, which ultimately improves investment efficiency. We contribute to the literature in an emerging market context by providing empirical evidence on the association between MRDs and investment efficiency across six emerging GCC capital markets. This study also fills a gap in the literature by providing evidence on the factors affecting the investment efficiency of financial firms.     

Measuring and explaining the efficiencies of the United Arab Emirates banking system

Using newly collected data from a survey distributed to all banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this article measures economic efficiency in the banking industry, namely allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency. Employing a nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, the study estimates the efficiency for a cross section of the UAE banks in 2004. The results indicate that the dominant source of inefficiency in the UAE banking is stemming from allocative inefficiency rather than technical inefficiency. Furthermore, the main source of the relatively small size, technical inefficiency in the UAE banking industry is not the scale inefficiency but rather pure technical inefficiency. The results further indicate that the UAE banks are able to use their input resources more efficiently when they have more branches, and that newer banks are performing better than older banks on average. Moreover, the results also show that short experiences of employees affect efficiencies negatively and government ownership tends to reduce efficiency (as the government shares increase in the bank, the efficiency scores get lower). Finally, the most interesting results have to do with finding higher average efficiencies in banks that employ more women, more managers and less national citizens of the UAE.     

Marx and Engels’ Vision of a Better Society

Notwithstanding their much noted aversion to detailing the nature of a post-capitalist society, Marx and Engels indeed have a broad vision of such a better society that both runs through and informs their entire lives' work. It is rooted in their concepts of the inherently social nature of humans and potential authentic human development in accord with human nature, and the negation by humans as the active agents of history of the barriers posed to that development. This paper discuses their dialectic approach to defining a better society, their concept of human nature that it rests on, and finally specifies a number general aspects they give for a better future socialist society.     

Talent management of skilled migrants: propositions and an agenda for future research

This paper unpacks the dominant conceptualizations of talent management (TM) in contemporary academic publications, and considers these in relation to the increasingly important workforce population of skilled international migrants. It postulates that TM approaches are generally built from a relatively narrow human capital-based perspective wherein organizations focus on readily accessible and immediate skills, ignoring the longer term strategic potential of the international workforce of skilled migrants, particularly for multinational enterprises and other international organizations. Through a series of propositions, the paper highlights how organizations, in strategically using a more comprehensive TM lens rather than a human capital lens in approaching the TM of skilled migrants, could benefit from improved HRM performance over time. It also proposes a research agenda, by which future studies might test, explore, and further develop understanding on a more strategic utilization of skilled migrants in organizations.     

Trees and decisions

Summary. The traditional model of sequential decision making, for instance, in extensive form games, is a tree. Most texts define a tree as a connected directed graph without loops and a distinguished node, called the root. But an abstract graph is not a domain for decision theory. Decision theory perceives of acts as functions from states to consequences. Sequential decisions, accordingly, get conceptualized by mappings from sets of states to sets of consequences. Thus, the question arises whether a natural definition of a tree can be given, where nodes are sets of states. We show that, indeed, trees can be defined as specific collections of sets. Without loss of generality the elements of these sets can be interpreted as representing plays. Therefore, the elements can serve as states and consequences at the same time.Received: 23 January 2003, Revised: 2 November 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D70. Correspondence to: Klaus RitzbergerWe are grateful to Larry Blume, Ariel Rubinstein, Jörgen Weibull, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at the universities of Vienna, Salamanca, and Heidelberg for helpful comments. Financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under project P15281 is also gratefully acknowledged.     

Team Incentives and Organizational Form

Conventional wisdom regarding nonprofit firms is that the absence of a profit motive renders them inefficient. However, the costs and product quality realized by profit-taking firms is determined by how well those firms deal with a variety of internal incentive and information problems, and this should be equally true for nonprofits. This article analyzes the team incentive problem in nonprofit organizations. Holmstrom (1982) showed that the introduction of a budget-breaker into a team permitted the creation of incentives to provide efficient effort when it is otherwise impossible. A similar result obtains for a nonprofit team, but the role of principal differs from that found in profit-taking teams. It is shown that any of: donors, government regulators, or Trustees can fulfill this role in a nonprofit team. One implication of this is shown to be that nonprofit firms may indeed pay employees less than otherwise identical employees earn in identical jobs in profit-taking firms.     

Fundamentals and Oil Price Behaviour: New Evidence from Co‐integration Tests with Structural Breaks and Granger Causality Tests

As the world economy has undergone various changes and shocks, the oil market went through significant fluctuations during the period 1994–2015. This study focuses on discussing the possible factors that determine crude oil prices, which include world economic growth, market power of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), non‐OPEC supply and the value of dollar, taking into account the structural changes that influence the study period, which is quarterly data for the period of 1994.Q1–2015.Q3. For time series stationarity tests, Zivot and Andrews (1992) and Perron (1997) unit root test with structural break is used. To test the existence of a long relationship in the presence of structural changes, the Gregory and Hansen (1996a, 1996b) method of co‐integration is used. For long‐run coefficient, we proceed to estimate fully modified least squares. The result shows a significant influence of non‐OPEC supply, the dollar appreciation and world gross domestic product growth, but OPEC did not have a significant effect on the price of oil, which is indicated by the structural break for OPEC capacity utilisation at 2002.Q1, that indicates the starting point of the loss of OPEC power. Establishing the presence of co‐integration, we apply the evaluation of Granger causality for co‐integrated data, using vector error‐correction model.