From patchwork to theory development: mapping and advancing research about business portfolio restructuring

While research on corporate or business portfolio restructuring has become an independent part of corporate restructuring research, the respective scholarly literature is in need of a systematic review that identifies the substantiated state of knowledge and reveals future research opportunities in this field of strategic management. The objective of our study is to fill this gap. Combining several literature retrieval methods 73 studies are identified and analyzed. As a result, current shortcomings in theory-building and empirical portfolio restructuring research are highlighted applying a framework that distinguishes between antecedents, processes, and outcomes of portfolio restructuring activities. The contribution of this paper goes beyond listing past achievements and disregarded issues as it proposes several directions for future research. Specifically, there is an urgent need for studying restructuring processes and the corresponding development or use of appropriate research methods.     

The intraday multivariate structure of the Eurofutures markets

We investigate the multivariate intraday structure in interest rates, focusing on implied forward rates from Eurofutures contracts. Since futures markets are the most liquid for interest rate instruments and they yield high-quality intraday data, it is somehow surprising that their intraday behavior has not been thoroughly studied in the literature.We find interesting similarities with the foreign exchange market: scaling law, intraday patterns, all of which point to the heterogeneity of market participants. Other properties like asymmetric causal information flow between fine and coarse volatilities for the same time series are present in our data. There are also lead–lag correlations across the term structure of implied forward rates, but they tend to disappear as markets mature.A principal component analysis of the short end of the yield curve allows us to determine the most important components and to reduce the number of time series needed to describe the term structure. We find the decomposition rather stable over time. The first component, which describes the curve level, shows an asymmetry in the information flow between volatilities of different time resolution, i.e., the coarse-grained volatility predicts the fine-grained volatility better than the other way around, as observed in the foreign exchange market. The remaining components do not show such an effect, having instead significant negative autocorrelations for the time series themselves. A heterogeneous autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (HARCH) model is estimated for the first component and the impact of different market agents is discussed.     

HRM and culture: History,ritual, and myth

The concept of organizational culture is here applied to the practice of human resource management. Reasons for the current emphasis on culture as an organizational metaphor are suggested. Cultural indicators which have diagnostic value for human resource professionals include organizational usage of symbols, rituals, ideologies, language, stories, myths, relationship, and humor. Examples of these indicators of culture are drawn from a variety of HRM practices and functions to explore the implications of each indicator. Alternative strategies are presented for improving the management of organizational change through sensitivity to cultural impact and better utilization of existing cultural realities.     

Accounting for South Korean GDP Growth: Index-Number and Econometric Estimates

The paper estimates the contribution of each one of the major determinants of South-Korean nominal GDP growth: technological change, movements in the terms of trade, increases in the endowments of labor and capital, and changes in domestic output prices. An index-number technique is used as well as an econometric approach. Both have a tight theoretical foundation, being based on the GDP function approach to modeling the production sector of an open economy.