Bank Consolidation, Internationalization, and Conglomeration: Trends and Implications for Financial Risk

This paper documents trends in bank activity, consolidation, internationalization, and financial firm conglomeration with data on more than 100 countries, and explores the extent to which financial firm risk and systemic risk potential in banking are related to consolidation and conglomeration. The relationship between consolidation, conglomeration and financial risk is documented using financial data on the largest 500 financial firms worldwide and on large banks in about 90 countries. We find that (a) large conglomerate firms did not exhibit levels of risk‐taking lower than smaller and specialized firms in 1995, while they exhibited higher levels of risk‐taking in 2000; (b) highly concentrated banking systems exhibited levels of systemic risk potential higher than less concentrated systems during the 1993–2000 period, and this relationship has strengthened during the 1997–2000 period. We outline research directions aimed at explaining why bank consolidation and conglomeration may not necessarily yield either safer financial firms or more resilient banking systems.     

Learning from failure: A systematized review

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - Iteration and improvement are important attributes of design, tacitly indicating that failure is also a part of the process. There are...     

Virtues, Managers and Business People: Finding a Place for MacIntyre in a Business Context

Critics point to four issues as presenting barriers to the use of virtue in the context of business. They focus on the relationship between management and practice, the potential for virtuous behaviour in a competitive environment, the ability to develop a reflexive critique of management that can be acted on, and the differentiation between work and wider social roles and people's propensity to take responsibility for them. In this paper we propose a solution to criticisms levelled at the use of virtue within Business Ethics. We examine the critiques of management in the context of Virtue Ethics and the application of these to business. In arguing for a role for business in being virtuous and promoting virtue we accept that the concept of management that is based on the type of liberalism founded on personal preference and benefit is deeply problematic and that management that is driven solely by profit is not compatible with the development of practice based virtue. However, we argue that to exclude those activities in which management is involved as a result would be wrong and dangerous. Instead we see the great advantageof a Virtue Ethic is that it conjures up an alternative vision to the dominant practice, and such an alternative vision is urgently needed in business today.     

The Socio-Cultural Embeddedness of Individuals' Ethical Reasoning in Organizations (Cross-cultural Ethics)

While models of business ethics increasingly recognize that ethical behavior varies cross-culturally, scant attention has been given to understanding how culture affects the ethical reasoning process that predicates individuals' ethical actions. To address this gap, this paper illustrates how culture may affect the various components of individuals' ethical reasoning by integrating findings from the cross-cultural management literature with cognitive-developmental perspective. Implications for future research and transnational organizations are discussed.     

Does Latin America Have More to Gain From Exchange Rate Liberalization than Sub-Saharan Africa?

An examination of the relationship between exchange rate liberalization and economic growth in selected Latin American and Sub-Saharan African countries reveals evidence of a short-run causal relationship between the two variables in both Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Within each region, exchange rate liberalization causes growth in some countries while others exhibit reverse causality running from growth to exchange rate leads to increased growth and growth induces exchange rate liberalization in most Latin American countries, in the majority of Sub-Saharan African countries studied, exchange rate liberalization reduces growth while growth causes distortions in the exchange rate. Market imperfections, expansionary fiscal and monetary policies under a fixed exchange rate regime, and poor terms of trade are cited as possible explanations for the findings for Sub-Saharan Africa. [F, O]     

Trade sensitive manufacturing employment: Some new insights

Persistent trade deficits in the United States since 1971, and growing foreign competition have revived debate about the net effects of trade on the domestic economy. Focusing on the employment consequences of trade, this study examines the demographic and industrial characteristics of trade sensitive manufacturing industries in the United States. The findings reveal two significant trends. Firstly, there has been a decline in the importance of high-tech manufacturing as a source of trade related employment opportunities since 1975. Secondly, while trade enhanced industries still employ relatively fewer women and minorities than industries adversely affected by trade, the gap has narrowed, especially for women. Since 1975, the proportion of all women employed in adversely affected industries actually declined; for every 1 percent decline in female employment in an adversely affected manufacturing industry there was a corresponding 0.6 percent gain in employment in a trade-enhanced manufacturing industry.     

Reliability of Assessment of Reading Ability in Three Countries

Over the last few decades, there have been a number ofnational and international programmes to assessperformance in key subjects. For example theInternational Association for Evaluation ofEducational Attainment (IEA), International Assessmentof Educational Progress (IAEP), and the ThirdInternational Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS)programs have aimed to compare performance betweenparticipating countries.Such exercises have different requirements from thosetests, such as public examinations, which aim toassess the attainment of individuals. National andinternational assessments aim to cover a very widerange of materials, and often use the technique ofmultiple matrix sampling to do so.The investigation is based on generalizability-typeanalyses of three national data sets at two ages, andlooks not only at the variance components arising fromsampling of schools, and of pupils within them, butalso at the variation between different assessmentinstruments, and between items within assessmentinstruments. If interpreted with care, such resultscan be of value in the design of future studies. Thispaper concentrates largely on the precision ofestimates of overall means, but analyses of the typedescribed could also be used to compare theperformance of subpopulations.