Fatal attraction: Using distance to measure contagion in good times as well as bad

This paper proposes a new measure of contagion that is good at anticipating future vulnerabilities. Building on previous work, it uses correlations of equity markets across countries to measure contagion, but in a departure from previous practice measures contagion using the relationship of these correlations with distance. Also in contrast to previous work, our test is good at identifying periods of “positive contagion,” in which capital flows to emerging markets in a herd-like manner largely unrelated to fundamentals. Identifying such periods of “fatal attraction” is important as they provide the essential ingredients for subsequent crises and rapid outflows of capital.     

Does ownership concentration improve M&A outcomes in emerging markets?: Evidence from India

Using firm level data from India, we examine the impact of ownership concentration on post-M&A performance of firms. Our analysis has implications for both the M&A literature, which emphasises the role of agency conflict between managers and owners of widely held companies as a key reason for M&A failures, and the corporate governance literature, especially in the context of emerging market economies. A cautious interpretation of our results suggests that while ownership concentration may reduce the manager–owner agency conflict, it may nevertheless precipitate other forms of agency conflict such that ownership concentration may not necessarily improve post-M&A performance. In particular, our results have implications for the literature on the agency conflict between large (or majority) shareholders and small (or minority) shareholders of a company, especially in contexts such as emerging market economies where corporate governance quality is weak.     

Green supplier selection: a new genetic/immune strategy with industrial application

With the onset of the ‘climate change movement’, organisations are striving to include environmental criteria into the supplier selection process. This article hybridises a Green Data Envelopment Analysis (GDEA)-based approach with a new Genetic/Immune Strategy for Data Envelopment Analysis (GIS-DEA). A GIS-DEA approach provides a different view to solving multi-criteria decision making problems using data envelopment analysis (DEA) by considering DEA as a multi-objective optimisation problem with efficiency as one objective and proximity of solution to decision makers’ preferences as the other objective. The hybrid approach called GIS-GDEA is applied here to a well-known automobile spare parts manufacturer in India and the results presented. User validation developed based on specific set of criteria suggests that the supplier selection process with GIS-GDEA is more practical than other approaches in a current industrial scenario with multiple decision makers.