Investor Protection – Why Gower is Wrong

Professor 'Jim' Gower's report, commissioned by Norman Tebbit's Department of Trade and Industry, calling for regulation of the 'investment industry', brings the Government's commitment to trade liberalisation seriously into doubt. Professor Gower has ignored a vast literature on regulation which reveals how it is 'captured' by interest groups to establish protected cartels. Furthermore, his proposals restrict competition that would benefit the consumer without outlawing restrictive practices. Norman Tebbit should reject Professor Gower's misguided advice decisively.     

PRICING COUPON-BOND OPTIONS AND SWAPTIONS IN AFFINE TERM STRUCTURE MODELS

This paper provides a numerically accurate and computationally fast approximation to the prices of European options on coupon-bearing instruments that is applicable to the entire family of affine term structure models. Exploiting the typical shapes of the conditional distributions of the risk factors in affine diffusions, we show that one can reliably compute the relevant probabilities needed for pricing options on coupon-bearing instruments by the same Fourier inversion methods used in the pricing of options on zero-coupon bonds. We apply our theoretical results to the pricing of options on coupon bonds and swaptions, and the calculation of "expected exposures" on swap books. As an empirical illustration, we compute the expected exposures implied by several affine term structure models fit to historical swap yields.     

An integrative approach to the gender gap in entrepreneurship across nations

Although female entrepreneurship contributes to the economic growth of nations, women are less likely to start new ventures compared to men. This gap, however, varies considerably across nations, suggesting that environmental factors play a role in explaining it. We employ the cross-cultural cognitive model of new venture creation to elucidate this variance. Based on data from 45 nations, we find that, while women and men differ pan-culturally in their likelihood to start new ventures, the socio-cultural dimensions of masculinity-femininity and institutional non-compliance exacerbate, while generalized trust mitigates this gap across nations.     

Correction to: A multi-country,multi-sector replication challenge to the validity of the cultural tightness-looseness measure

Asia Pacific Journal of Management - The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes. Appendix heading was misplaced and first entry of the Appendix table was incorrectly...     

Mandatory IFRS adoption and the cost of debt in Italy and UK

This paper analyses the effect of the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) within the EU on the cost of corporate debt. In order to avoid the imprecision involved in a large-scale cross-country study, we examine the impact of IFRS in two very clearly different institutional settings, the UK and Italy. The UK is a common-law country characterised by strong enforcement and national generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) which are equivalent to IFRS. Italy is a typical European code-law country, characterised by a weak outside investor protection system, and national GAAP significantly different from the IFRS model. No IFRS effect is observed in the UK, consistent with it having standards which are close to IFRS. During the post-IFRS period, in Italy more weight is placed on the accounting numbers to assess the cost of debt. We also find that accruals quality improves in Italy, thus suggesting that public financial reporting data are enhanced relative to privately held information about borrowers' credit ratings.     

Between autonomy and control: Expatriate managers and strategic IHRM in SMEs

Much research in the relatively new area of International HRM has concentrated on the problems of expatriates and expatriation issues (Scullion, 1995; Brewster & Harris, 1999). These are often related to concerns that they face in working in a foreign environment; particularly, such issues as cultural difficulties and other factors associated with assignment failure (Harzing, 1995; Forster, 1997). However, there is very little research on what expatriates do as managers in a foreign context, and how this relates to overall business and HRM strategy in the organization as a whole. This article is a small contribution to this growing debate, and examines the strategic relationship between the HRM department at national HQ and how its strategy and policy is translated by expatriates at subsidiary levels in a relatively small organization operating in 37 countries. The article focuses most particularly on the tensions between local autonomy of the organization's various overseas units and the attempts by its headquarters to achieve control. We particularly examine the role of HRM in attempting to find this balance. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Winning the tournament for named professorships in management

We apply tournament theory to explain the process within which selection of named professorships takes place and a procedural justice test to justify winning the named professorship tournament. Specifically, we estimate the probability that management professors hold one of the highest rewards for academic research productivity, a named professorship, as a function of his or her research credentials, as measured by the number of articles published in a small core of elite management journals. Alphabetically, these are Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, Operations Research, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Although each of the eight journals is positively related to the probability of attaining a named professorship, the Academy of Management Review and the Academy of Management Journal emerge as the two most influential management journals.     

Exploring the Acceptability of Spatial Simulation Models of Outdoor Recreation for Use by Participants in Public Participation Processes

The use of spatial simulation models in public participation processes through multiple facilitated group sessions is explored in northern Ontario, Canada. Participants evaluated the acceptability of an agent-based model of recreational fishing while working through hypothetical management scenarios. Four main concepts are linked to acceptability: credibility, comprehensiveness, comprehension, and utility. These concepts were generally consistent across sessions. However, differences were observed in themes related to the concepts for some contexts. Consequently, recreation researchers and managers who want to use spatial simulation models with various publics should focus not only on the model's content and display of information but also on how the model is communicated.