Local Responsive Talent Management for Foreign Multinational Enterprises in China

China evolves with amazing speed to be a leading player in the world economy. However, the transformation from isolated centrally planned to internationally open market economy during the past 25 years has occurred so fast that the change in the mindset and the adaptation of new modern business practice is still in progress. Foreign multinational enterprises in the mainland of China responded to the resulting shortcomings of Chinese professionals and managers by covering the key position in the organization by their own resources or managers from neighbor Asian countries. In this qualitative study, a new local responsive talent management concept for foreign multinational enterprises with expatriated managers was proposed under special consideration of the cultural business environment in China. The establishment of a learning firm culture with advanced training system to compensate the drawbacks of Chinese professionals was outlined. The coverage of the key positions in the organization by Chinese professionals with established social network and optionally supported by temporary foreign advisors was proposed to improve the firm climax, domestic customer and stakeholder relations.     

Synergy Evaluation in Mergers and Acquisitions: An Attention-Based View

A core objective of corporate development relates to scope decisions, which regularly involve mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The dominant idea behind M&A is often captured by the umbrella term ‘synergy’. Yet, while performance is the key variable of most M&A studies, how firms arrive at a particular synergetic value for a target firm is not well understood. In this article, we contribute to this body of research. We argue that understanding the determination of synergies in M&A requires a look at the mechanisms that guide managerial attention towards specific valuation practices and synergy types. Specifically, by drawing on the attention-based view of the firm, we show that the evaluation of synergies cannot be divorced from the underlying attention structure in the M&A context and the various valuation practices that constitute different synergy types. Our analysis suggests that synergies often do not reflect the true potential of acquisitions. We reveal that this is due to an attentional crowding-out effect: The congruence of M&A attention structures with valuation practices for functional synergies crowd out the attention allocation to business models and strategic synergies. We describe the characteristics of this crowding-out effect as well as its implications.     

A Better Asymmetric Model of Changing Volatility in Stock and Exchange Rate Returns: Trend-GARCH

Abstract

The impact of short run price trending on the conditional volatility is tested empirically. A new family of conditionally heteroscedastic models with a trend-dependent conditional variance equation: The Trend-GARCH model is described. Modern microeconomic theory often suggests the connection between the past behaviour of time series, the subsequent reaction of market individuals, and thereon changes in the future characteristics of the time series. Results reveal important properties of these models, which are consistent with stylized facts found in financial data sets. They can also be employed for model identification, estimation, and testing. The empirical analysis supports the existence of trend effects. The Trend-GARCH model proves to be superior to alternative models such as EGARCH, AGARCH, TGARCH OR GARCH-in-Mean in replicating the leverage effect in the conditional variance, in fitting the news impact curve and in fitting the volatility estimates from high frequency data. In addition, we show that the leverage effect is dependent on the current trend, i.e. it differentiates between bullish and bearish markets. Furthermore, trend effects can account for a significant part of the long memory property of asset price volatilities.     

Analyzing the labor market activity of immigrant families in Germany

This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein, upon arrival, an immigrant spouse invests in host country-specific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family's current consumption and the spouse's skills accumulation. Using data for West Germany, we do not find evidence for such a specialization strategy. We further examine the labor supply and wage assimilation of families whose members immigrated together relative to families whose members immigrated sequentially. Our estimates indicate that this differentiation is relevant for the analysis of the labor market activities of migrant households.     

New telecommunications services in Austria : A technology assessment

Public fears have grown up surrounding the uncertain potential benefit or harm of recent rapid technological advances in Austrian telecommunications. A technology assessment was called for, to proffer comprehensive and balanced information on the current state of, and future developments in, Austrian telecommunications. This paper explains the organization of the Austrian PTT, discusses successful new services, considers their relationship to the law and the economy, and analyses their social impact.