Spin‐offs: Tackling the Conglomerate Discount

Spin‐offs and other restructuring actions have risen sharply in 2011, driven by the need to streamline business models and increase corporate values. These transactions can be an effective tool for addressing the conglomerate valuation discount that has been a pervasive phenomenon over the past decade, affecting conglomerates in most regions across the world. In particular, North American and Western European conglomerates trade at valuation multiples that are roughly 10% lower than those of their pure‐play peers. A conglomerate discount also prevails in some of the emerging markets, including CEEMEA and Asia. Nevertheless, in some regions, notably Japan and Latin America, conglomerates typically trade at a premium. Although the average conglomerate discount narrowed during the financial crisis due to the perceived benefits of diversification during downturns, almost half of the conglomerates globally trade at a discount, and almost a third of all conglomerates have persistently traded at a discount during the past five years. For such companies, fixing the discount requires a simplification of the business model. The authors show that recent announcements of spin‐offs have led to significant share price outperformance by the parent company in both the short and the longterm, highlighting their effectiveness as a tool to enhance valuation. Spin‐offs can be particularly attractive for those conglomerates that operate unrelated business segments since these firms trade at a sharper discount than diversified firms operating in related businesses. The authors discuss how management should think about the financial implications of spin‐offs, including capital structure considerations, dividend policy, and turnover in the shareholder base.     

Leasing in Russia: A Case Study

As Russia goes through the process of converting from a command to a market economy, many old business processes and standards had to be terminated and new methods implemented. Leasing is an example of a technique long in use in more developed economies that has been transplanted to Russia, with changes made to reflect the particular circumstances there. This paper examines the current state of leasing in Russia by concentrating on the experiences of one leasing company: Volgopromleasing. Interest rates and inflation rates that fluctuate widely and are sometimes extremely high, as well as a legislative environment that may be expected to change are some of the challenges faced by the firm. However, compensating opportunities exist: many Russian firms desperately need to update their equipment, the government is strongly interested in promoting rapid economic growth, and the legislation currently in effect favors leasing over other methods of acquiring fixed assets. Although leasing has the potential to assist Russian firms in modernizing and growing, and, therefore, to help the Russian economy in its effort to rapidly move to a new market economy, this can only occur in conjunction with other economic initiatives that also provide for growth and stabilization.     

Ecological tourism in the state image policy structure. Experience and problems of modern Russia

The article deals with the problems of ecological tourism in Russia. The authors give various approaches to the understanding of ecological tourism in modern science, analyse the reasons of interest in this kind of tourism, consider its types and identify specific features. The article provides an overview of the main regions and countries where ecological tourism is developed at a high level and considers some national policy models in the field of ecological tourism. Specific attention is paid to the analysis of the development of ecological tourism in Russia and its current status; the examples of different programmes aiming at support of ecological tourism are given. Specific impetus is given to Russia's resources for the development of ecological tourism, for example, natural landscapes, national parks and nature heritage sites. The authors explore the main challenges to ecological tourism in Russia, identify factors that hinder its development and suggest measures to improve the ecological tourism in the Russian Federation. The authors focus on the projects that promote the improvement of Russia's image as an eco-touristic destination. The authors pay specific attention to the analysis of international cooperation in this field. The article discusses various projects carried out within the framework of bilateral cooperation. The article discusses the role of ecological tourism as a tool for image policy. The article analyses in detail which elements of the Russian image are under the influence of ecological tourism and what are the future prospects of ecological tourism.     

Spillovers in Space: Does Geography Matter?

Using U.S. firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market (“horizontal”). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the distribution of a firm's inventor locations as well as its headquarters. We find that geographic location is important for productivity, as are technology (but not product) spillovers, and that both intra and inter–regional (counties) spillovers matter. The geographic location of a firm's researchers is more important than its headquarters. These benefits may be the reason why local policy makers compete so hard for the location of local R&D labs and high tech workers.     

Greediness and equilibrium in congestion games

We study the class of congestion games for which the set of Nash equilibrium is equivalent to the set of strategy profiles played by greedy myopic players. We show these two coincide iff such games are played over extension-parallel graphs.     

Slow-moving capital and stock returns

This paper studies the effects that delay in capital allocations in the stock market and high short-term trading incentives have on returns of this market. We report that capital inertia makes the Sharpe ratio and the volatility of the stock returns many times higher than in an economy with no capital delays. Furthermore, in agreement with empirical literature, the stock price displays short-term overreaction and high volatility of the conditional Sharpe ratio.     

Budget deficits and inflation feedback

This paper reinterprets the mixed evidence of the relationship between budget deficits and inflation in high inflation economies. The main finding is that recurrent outbursts of extreme inflation in these economies can be explained by a certain hysteresis effect associated with public finance. This interpretation meets the evidence that dramatic shifts between regimes of moderately high and extremely high (hyper-) inflation often occur without visible deterioration in public finance or abrupt shifts in fiscal or monetary policies. The existence of this hysteresis effect is explicitly explained by the action of two mechanisms: the arithmetic associated with the wrong side of the inflation tax Laffer curve and the Patinkin effect (the reverse of the much oftener cited Olivera-Tanzi effect). It is also shown that the division of the operational budget deficit into the part that is subject to negative inflation feedback and the part that is inflation-proof has implications for both the discussion of the inflationary consequences of budget deficits and the design of stabilization policy.     

Multidimensional screening under nonlinear costs: Limits of standard approach

We generalize the usual screening approach and conditions for efficiency-at-the-top and acyclic property from linear to fixed-plus-separable or concave costs and multidimensional commodities. But under non-concave costs, like capacity constraints, an example shows a cycle in the solution graph. The cycle makes the standard screening solution non-implementable and approach inadequate.     

A Dynamic Model of Optimal Capital Structure

This paper presents a continuous time model of a firm that candynamically adjust both its capital structure and its investmentchoices. In the model we endogenize the investment choice aswell as firm value, which are both determined by an exogenousprice process that describes the firm's product market. Withinthe context of this model we explore cross-sectional as wellas time-series variation in debt ratios. We pay particular attentionto interactions between financial distress costs and debtholder/equityholderagency problems and examine how the ability to dynamically adjustthe debt ratio affects the deviation of actual debt ratios fromtheir targets. Regressions estimated on simulated data generatedby our model are roughly consistent with actual regressionsestimated in the empirical literature.     

Market Imperfections, Investment Flexibility, and Default Spreads

This paper develops a structural model that determines default spreads in a setting where the debt's collateral is endogenously determined by the borrower's investment choice, and a demand variable with permanent and temporary components. We also consider the possibility that the borrower cannot commit to taking the value‐maximizing investment choice, and may, in addition, be constrained in its ability to raise external capital. Based on a model calibrated to data on office buildings and commercial mortgages, we present numerical simulations that quantify the extent to which investment flexibility, incentive problems, and credit constraints affect default spreads.