Operating performance of European bank mergers

With very few exceptions the accepted viewpoint established by (predominantly) US research is that bank operating performance is not improved after merger. In this article we concentrate on European banks and investigate post-merger operating performance for 35 publicly listed bank mergers that were completed between 1992 and 1997. We find that industry-adjusted mean cash flow return did not significantly change after merger but stayed positive. We also find that the merger led to a significant decrease in profitability and capitalisation. Our key finding, in contrast to the US evidence, is that cost-efficiency ratios improved, although the improvement was not large enough to offset the profitability decrease. We also find that low profitability levels, conservative credit policies and good cost-efficiency status before merger are the main determinants of industry-adjusted cash flow returns and provide the source for improving these returns after merger.     

Supply Chain Management Competency and Firm Financial Success

Supply chain management (SCM) plays a major role in creating (or destroying) shareholder value by influencing the three major drivers of firm financial performance: revenue, operating costs, and working capital. Yet, the relationship between SCM competency and firm financial performance is not well‐established. Drawing on the resource‐based view of the firm, this study assesses this relationship using Delphi‐style opinion data from AMR Research’s Supply Chain Top 25 rankings to assess SCM competency and Altman’s (1968) Z‐score statistic as the measure of financial success. The study findings show that firms recognized by industry experts for SCM competency have significantly higher Z‐scores than their close competitors and industry averages.     

A natural science approach to investigate cross-cultural managerial creativity

As the relative effectiveness of physical resources decreases toward parity with rivals due to their fungibility, the firm's marketplace position, established by managers with a particular set of inter-culturally attuned set of personal values, may be the key antecedent in creating competitive strength in the firm. The research question addressed is how creative are culturally diverse managers; are managers from certain countries more creative than adaptive?We tested hypotheses in a cross-cultural setting based on the survey responses of 1365 managers operating in eight countries located in four culturally diverse regions of the world.Our study shows that managers are both creative and adaptive but the mixture of creative and adaptive behaviour varies depending on region and country and even within countries. Furthermore, the results confirm that creativity among managers in some countries is similar but large differences also exist between countries.     

Grid analysis for sales supervision

Falling to recognize the unique need and desire of salespeople, the sales manager tends to allocate supervisory time according to the amount of his or her past selling experience. This time allocation results in either the excessive or insufficient supervision of sales personnel. This article describes a process of arriving at a more optimum allocation of supervisory time.     

Realising the Potential – and Lost Opportunities – for Peer Collaboration in D&T Setting

This paper follows up our theoretical discussion of the potential for collaborative problem solving in Design and Technology (Hennessy and Murphy, 1999). In this paper we report our empirical investigation of peer collaboration in a setting where we identified the presence of significant pre-conditions for productive collaboration. The study investigated the participation of two boys aged 13 who worked together with their teacher over 8 weeks in designing and making an aid for a child with a disability. We analysed their participation using a framework of key features derived from the research literature. Our analyses yielded evidence of effective collaboration in the early design stage, but the students' collaboration and their progress were subsequently undermined. The reasons related to the students' ability to collaborate and the tension for the teacher between students' learning needs and client needs within an authentic activity. The outcome was a successful product but a wealth of lost opportunities – and lack of support – for the students' collaborative problem solving and Design and Technology (D&T) learning. Our observations confirm that despite little evidence of collaboration in D&T, this setting offers extensive resources for supporting collaboration in joint design, planning and problem-solving activities. We also identify impediments to collaboration as a learning mechanism. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Determinants of the ARM share of national and regional lending

We model the ARM share of mortgage lending and provide several unique contributions to the mortgage choice literature. First, we motivate the use of the price spread between fixed- and adjustable-rate credit as a regressor by constraining the effect of FRM and ARM prices to be symmetric and show that the data support this restriction. Second, our data span a far longer time period (six years) than previous research. Third, we estimate separate share equations by region, allowing us to contrast geographic variation in ARM shares. Fourth, we examine the effect of convertible ARMs—which became prevalent in mid-1987—on overall ARM lending.     

Seasonal Variation in Cost-of-Funds at Thrift Institutions

The purpose of this note is threefold. First, in addition to the well-known seasonal pattern to the eleventh-district cost-of-funds (COF), we document a twelve-month seasonal in the national median COF. Second, we demonstrate that the cause of seasonality in each of these COF series is due to the maladjustment of length-of-month effects. In particular, the eleventh-district COF is biased upwards in relatively short months while the national median is biased downward. Third, we show that the popular partial adjustment model for modeling the COF is misspecified.     

Financial comparability and environmental diversity: an international context

Accounting and environmental management both hold improved resource‐use efficiency as an ultimate goal, but intermediate processes and objectives vary and consequently it is separately assessed within each discipline. This paper intends to make visible the globalizing trends in accounting practice, which aim to standardize financial reporting to produce comparable information so that shareholders can maximize their economic wealth. This paper seeks to contrast this comparability strategy with the apparent need for diversity in accounting information exhibited by actual accounting practices, the information needs of environmental management and, ultimately, the cultural needs of sustainable development. We argue that a more pluralistic model, that enables a holistic assessment of corporate performance and balances diverse stakeholder objectives, is better suited to an uncertain future. Implementation requires accountants and environmental managers jointly to create and test a new order of reporting. There are many practical challenges but most significantly accountants and environmental managers must combine to enhance the visibility and credibility of these diverse performance measures. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment     

Development of agriculture in Ethiopia since the 1975 land reform

A stated objective of the Ethiopian Government since it came to power in 1975 has been to increase the production of crops for both domestic consumption and export. Consequently, a number of plans and programs have been proposed and implemented to bring about such development in Ethiopian agriculture. This paper mainly focuses 011 a macro review of the general course of Ethiopian agricultural development since the land reform of 1975. The food production in Ethiopia has lagged behind the population growth as evidenced by the gap between the growth rates of population (3%) and food production (1.8%) over the period from 1970 to 1983. Recently, this situation has, perhaps, further deteriorated. Seventy-one percent of the total land mass is estimated to be suitable for agriculture, but only about 19% is cultivated. This suggests an underutilisation of land. Moreover, Ethiopia has a persistent subsistence production problem in agriculture. Agricultural research and education which are essential to development have not been given due attention by the policy makers. As a result, the agricultural technologies used by farmers have changed little in this century. Moreover, small-scale farmers, although still the most potent economic force in the country, have not been given the incentives necessary to expand production, and currently receive less than adequate support from the central government. Some 85%, 50%, and 79% of total agricultural credit, fertiliser and improved seeds respectively go directly to socialist enterprises (state farms and producers' cooperatives) which, up to 1985, have jointly accounted for only 5% of the total cultivated land and 4% of the national crop production. The favouring of large-scale and capital-intensive state-owned farming enterprises with credit, subsidies, and fiscal incentives, while neglecting smallholders, has contributed to the stagnation of agricultural production in Ethiopia. Overall, the analysis indicates that there has been no significant development of agriculture in Ethiopia following the 1975 land reform.