Corporate performance and firm perception: The British experience

Previous academic research has presented a theoretical basis for a relationship between attributes of a firm's reputation and its financial performance. For the United States, researchers have analysed the correspondence between market and accounting based measures of US firm performance and external evaluators' perceptions of the qualitative attributes of US firms. In this study, expert surveys on the qualitative performance of British firms conducted by the British publication, the Economist, which are similar in content to surveys conducted by Fortune magazine for US firms, are used to determine the correspondence between qualitative and quantitative measures of British firms' performance. Results indicate that differences may exist between US and Britain in the use of qualitative survey data on a firm's strategic attributes as a forecast of a firm's future quantitative performance measures. Results also indicate that for small firms, certain qualitative factors (e.g. capacity to innovate) may be of greater importance in forecasting accounting and security market returns.     

The role of takeovers in increasing efficiency

This paper extends the limited number of studies that examine whether the threat of takeovers serves as an efficiency-enforcement mechanism. A nonparametric programming approach is utilized to construct a measure of overall efficiency that is decomposed into technical and allocative components. Utilizing three inputs and five outputs, measures of efficiency are constructed for a sample of 578 banks from states that permit acquisitions and states that do not. The results indicate that, on average, banks that are subject to takeovers tend to be more efficient Furthermore, the lack of threat of takeovers appears to induce inefficiencies that are technical in nature. The evidence lends support to the hypothesis that the threat of takeovers improves efficiency in firms.     

An Analysis of Resolution Trust Corporation Transactions: Auction Market Process and Pricing

This article describes the operations of the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), examines the procedures it employs to resolve distressed Savings and Loan scenarios and investigates the pricing of transactions undertaken by the RTC. The RTC has been criticized for allegedly transferring properties to acquirers at "bargain" prices. The transactions involving publicly traded acquirers in RTC sales are examined from an auction theory perspective. Overall, there is little evidence that winning bidders experience stock price gains. There are, however, subsets of bidders for which the outcomes are predominantly negative. The only category of transactions which provide statistically significant gains to acquirers are Insured Deposit Transfers.     

Did bank distress stifle innovation during the Great Depression?

We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient number of R&D intensive firms were located in counties with lower levels of bank distress, or were operating in less capital intensive industries, the negative effects were mitigated in aggregate. Although Depression era bank distress was associated with the stifling of innovation, our results also help to explain why technological development was still robust following one of the largest shocks in the history of the U.S. banking system.     

Asymmetric Patterns of Demand-Supply Mismatch in Real Estate

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - As expectations change, we may observe asymmetry in responses of economic agents over various phases of the economic cycles. In this paper, we...