Pathways to Success in M&A

For many if not most publicly traded companies, acquisition capabilities remain a critical component of sustainable longterm growth and profitability. And even as investors press companies to return excess capital through dividends and stock buybacks, the market continues to assign premium valuations to companies that earn above-average returns through a combination of internal investment and judicious acquisition spending.
This article begins by describing major challenges facing acquirers in the current business and regulatory environment. Then, after showing how M&A can be used to address strategic goals, the authors identify key elements in the M&A strategies of three highly successful companies: General Electric, Danaher, and Illinois Tool Works.     

E-Business Transformation via Alliance Clusters

The number of firms using alliances as part of their corporate venturing or market entry strategies has surged over the past decade. Three common reasons cited for pursuing alliances are technology convergence, market access and alliance partners' complementary resources. This paper contrasts the alliance strategies of HP and IBM, two major competitors in electronic services (i.e. Internet-based 'e- service') businesses, using the Familiarity Matrix as a display tool to portray the strategies. Whereas the HP strategy is to attempt to establish its technology infrastructure as the standard e-services infrastructure on the Internet, IBM aims to position its IBM Global Services, rather than its technology, at the center of this ecosystem.     

Why are there glitches in product development?

Managers and scholars emphasize the importance of inter‐departmental integration to successful product development and emphasize the importance of product development capabilities to firm performance. Interdepartmental integration can increase shared knowledge; this in turn can reduce the severity and incidence of seemingly unnecessary and costly mistakes leading to more efficient and effective product development. This paper examines the sources of shared knowledge problems across functional and product‐based groups. Using interviews, product development plans, and time‐sheet data, we look at the underlying factors behind two sources of knowledge sharing problems: (1) a serial product development process (i.e. little or no face‐to‐face communications) and (2) ineffective use of integrating mechanisms because of sticky knowledge. For each problem source, we find two key causal factors. We discuss the problems, their factors, and the implications for management and theory.     

Worker separations in a nonstationary corporate environment

Assessing ten years of unique personnel data from a large firm, this paper investigates how determinants of worker turnover differ between periods of corporate expansion and decline. Performance and career progress considerably reduce the hazard of job separation during downsizing for blue-collar workers, but are less important for white-collar workers. Effects of firm-tenure, occupation, education, training, part-time status, and gender are largely in accordance with the implications from existing models. But no model generates all patterns observed in the data. Age effects are sensitive to retirement options and discontinuous, dropping in response to the anticipation of becoming eligible for early retirement during downsizing and jumping at the actual retirement age.     

Allocating an advertising budget to international travel markets

Deciding on advertising appropriations is a common problem to all National Tourist Offices. The Austrian National Tourist Office now employs a decision support model allowing for inclusion of managerial judgments. In tourism, like elsewhere, application of standard optimization routines to marketing decision making is straight- forward, once the relationship linking market response to input has been modeled adequately. A tailor-made decision calculus procedure eliciting managerial judgments on the relative importance of the factors determining a receiving country's travel market share provides the weights otherwise inaccessible by objective parameter estimation. A tourism manager thus can evaluate countries as tourism generators and allocate an advertising budget accordingly.     

Economic Development Indicators as Determinants of Medal Winning at the Sydney Olympics: An Extreme Bounds Analysis

This paper examines the variables that determine the performance of countries at the Olympic Games as measured by a weighted sum of the medals won at the Sydney 2000 Games. While previous studies have identified the importance of a country's economic size and the resources available to sport, this paper examines nine more variables including the number of athletes representing each nation and some development indicators. Based on 2310 regressions, both traditional and restricted extreme bounds analysis show that only two variables are robust: the number of athletes and national expenditure on health. Thus, the final model recognises four explanatory variables that include these two as well as GDP and population.     

MODELING THE TERM STRUCTURE FROM THE ON‐THE‐RUN TREASURY YIELD CURVE

We propose a new model to estimate the term structure of interest rates using observed on‐the‐run Treasury yields. The new model is an improvement over models that require a priori knowledge of the shape of the yield curve to estimate the term structure. The general form of the model is an exponential function that depends on the estimation of four parameters fit by nonlinear least squares and has straightforward interpretations. In comparing the proposed model with current yield‐curve‐smoothing models, we find that, for the data used, the proposed model does best overall in terms of pricing accuracy both in sample and out of sample. JEL classification: E43, G12     

PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN AGRICULTURE (REVISITED): A MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORK AND SOME EMPIRICAL RESULTS

This paper explores the methodology of sectoral productivity growth measurement within the framework of input-output analysis. A method which ensures that sectoral productivity growth rates are consistent with productivity growth rates for the economy as a whole (as well as allowing for external trade) is suggested. New estimates are presented on total factor productivity in UK agriculture using a Tornqvist index procedure. In addition, new estimates of agricultural labour productivity growth are presented, taking account not only of labour employed in agriculture but also of labour employed in ancillary industries on the supply side. The empirical results confirm that part of the labour previously employed on farms has shifted “upstream” to industries providing agriculture with fertilises, machinery and other inputs.