Bond rating agencies and their role in bank market discipline

This study examines whether changes in the ratings of bank debt have any information content. Bank holding companies are monitored both by bank regulators and by debt rating agencies, leading to the view that duplication of effort may render superfluous the monitoring service of rating agencies. However, our results show that downgrades of bank debt are associated with statistically significant wealth losses, irrespective of whether the rating change is across rating classes or within a rating class. Moreover, the results hold even when observations with potentially confounding events are removed from the sample. These results suggest that rating agencies provide valuable information to the capital market regarding the risk exposure of bank holding companies.     

A Survey of Major Approaches for Accelerating New Product Development

Product life-cycles are becoming shorter, leading firms to reduce the time to bring new products to market. Being early can provide a significant competitive advantage, making the acceleration of new product development (NPD) an important area for research and inquiry. Based on their review of a wide range of literatures in business strategy, marketing, new product development, manufacturing and organization management, Murray Millson, S. P. Raj and David Wilemon report a general set of techniques for reducing the developmental cycle time for new products. The article develops a hierarchy of available NPD acceleration approaches and discusses potential benefits, limitations and significant challenges to successful implementation.     

Business strategies for multinational intellectual property protection

Intellectual property protection and management (IPPM) are important operational and strategic issues especially for global companies. Most prior discussions of this topic focus heavily on the legal aspects of this topic. However, by the time legal action becomes necessary, the stakes and costs have risen to very high levels for all parties. This article argues that the nonlegal aspects of IPPM are perhaps more important in practice and can be designed to forestall or limit more expensive legal action. This article provides some guidelines and practical advice for companies that would like to improve their IPPM processes. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An Ongoing race: family CEOs vs. non-family CEOs

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Recent studies have established that non-family CEOs invariably outperform family CEOs. In this paper, we argue that the case against family...     

Common Stochastic Trends Among Asian Currencies: Evidence for Japan,Aseans, and the Asian Tigers

This study documents that daily changes in Asian exchange rates are significantly non-normal, serially correlated, non-stationary, and have unit roots. Further, accounting for these time series properties and using a longer time horizon than other similar studies of exchange rates, this study also documents cointegration between the Japanese Yen and two sets of Asian currencies, i.e., currencies of the 'Tigers', Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan; and currencies of the ASEANs, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore. These findings of cointegration among Asian exchange rates are in contrast to the findings for the major currencies, and are evidence of nascent Yen blocs in Asia. The results presented here have important implications for understanding Asian financial integration and the international role of the Japanese yen and should be useful for developing asset allocation, currency overlay, value at risk (VAR), and hedging strategies for investments in these often illiquid Asian currencies.     

The Effect of Interpersonal Trust,Need for Cognition,and Social Loneliness on Shopping,Information Seeking and Surfing on the Web

This study contends that certain personality traits of e-consumers have an affect on their shopping, surfing and information seeking behaviors on the Web. Specifically, it is proposed that e-consumers who are low on interpersonal trust are less likely to shop on the Web due to their heightened concerns with Web security. Similarly, an argument is made that e-consumers who enjoy cognitively demanding processing tasks are more likely to use the Web for information search. Finally, it is posited that social loners will be selectively drawn to Web surfing. Findings from an empirical study are presented which support these assertions. Implications of this study for marketers and future researchers are discussed.     

New directions in business cycle research and financial analysis

This paper serves as a partial introduction to and survey of the literature on Markov-switching models. We review the history of this class of models, describe their mathematical structure, and exposit the basic ideas behind estimation and inference. The paper also describes how the approach can be extended in a variety of directions, such as non-Gaussian distributions, time-varying transition probabilities, vector processes, state-space and GARCH models, and surveys recent methodological advances. The contributions of the other papers in this volume are reviewed. A final section offers conclusions and implications for policy. First Version Received: August 2001/Final Version Received: October 2001