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.     

Should the Good and the Selfish be Taxed Differently?*

In this paper, we consider an environment where individual actions have externalities and two types of agents exist: agents with social preferences (the good) and selfish agents. Selfish agents have pay‐off functions that do not take into account social welfare. The pay‐off of an agent is a linear combination of social welfare and the pay‐off of a selfish agent. We demonstrate that the corrective tax rates that maximize social welfare do not depend on the degree of social preferences. Hence, the good and the selfish should not be taxed differently.     

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.     

Stochastic trend,weather and US corn yield variability

Regional corn yield models incorporating stochastic trends, prices and weather variables are estimated. Hypothesis tests suggest yield variability has increased because of an increase in error variance and an increase in weather-related effects. Decomposition of the error variance shows much of its increase is due to an increased correlaion between regional yields.     

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.     

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.     

The Economics of Farm Fragmentation: Evidence from Ghana and Rwanda

Farm fragmentation, in which a household operates more thanone separate parcel of land, is a common phenomenon in Sub-SaharanAfrica. Concerned by the perceived costs of fragmented as opposedto consolidated holdings, several countries have implementedland consolidation programs. But these interventions overlookthe benefits that land fragmentation can offer farmers in managingrisk, in overcoming seasonal labor bottlenecks, and in bettermatching soil types with necessary food crops. This articleuses household data from Ghana and Rwanda to discuss the incidenceand causes of fragmentation. It then formally tests the relationbetween fragmentation and land productivity and risk reduction.The conclusion is that consolidation programs are unlikely tolead to significant increases in land productivity and may actuallymake farmers worse off. Policymakers should focus instead onreducing the root causes of fragmentation: inefficiencies inland, labor, credit, and food markets.     

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