Vertical integration to avoid contracting with potential competitors: Evidence from bankers' banks

We examine a vertical integration decision within the commercial banking industry. During the last quarter of the 20th century, some community banks reduced their traditional reliance on correspondent banks for upstream products and services by joining bankers' banks, a form of business cooperative. Research on vertical integration focuses primarily on firm-specific investment, market power, and government regulation. However, this case is difficult to explain in terms of these standard vertical integration motives. Our evidence suggests that bankers' banks are a response to technological change and deregulation that results in increased costs faced by community banks in dealing with correspondent banks as both suppliers and potential competitors. For instance, loan participations require sharing proprietary information about major loan customers, something a community bank would not want to provide to a potential competitor.     

Monetary policy matters: Evidence from new shocks data

The evidence suggests that monetary policy post 1988 became more forward-looking, invalidating the identifying assumptions in conventional methods of measuring monetary policy's effects, leading to spurious and unlikely results for this period. We propose a new identification scheme that uses factors extracted from Fed Funds futures to measure exogenous changes in policy. Using this shock series in a VAR, we recover the contractionary effect of monetary tightening on output. Moreover, we find that as much as half of the variability in output was driven by monetary policy shocks, and that there is a mild price puzzle.     

The energy conservation demonstration projects scheme; A case study in technology transfer

The author has investigated the causes of the relative failure of ETSU-sponsored energy saving projects. Using a set of characteristics of successful innovations proposed by Twiss the author assessed how far a number of ETSU projects met them. He concludes that the major cause of failure was over-stressing product performance and under-stressing market need. This fault was compounded by the effects of a number of organisational variables over which ETSU had too little executive control. He concludes that innovatory projects proceeding under this kind of management system are more likely to fail than succeed and public money should not be spent on them.     

Tax Rules and the Sale and Leaseback of Corporate Real Estate

This study examines the effect of the sale and leaseback of corporate real estate on the stock prices of the selling firms. We ask whether the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA 1986) had a negative impact on the market valuation effects of corporate sale and leasebacks. The results of the comparative statics analysis predict that the net present value of the lessee should be negatively related to the tax depreciation recovery life for the lessor and to the marginal ordinary income tax rate of the marginal holder of commercial mortgage debt. However, it should be positively related to the marginal tax rate of the equityholder of the corporate lessee. Changes in the marginal ordinary income tax rates of the lessor and the corporate lessee have an ambiguous effect on the equity value of the corporate lessee. Nevertheless, results of simulation analyses suggest that the relationship between the net present value of the lessee and each of the tax rates of the lessor and corporate lessee is negative. The empirical evidence suggests that subsequent to TRA 1986, the lessee's benefits associated with sale and leaseback transactions have decreased.     

Communication patterns in small R & D projects

An empirical investigation was carried out on the pattern and role of communication in two ongoing applied research projects in one of the national laboratories of the C. S. I. R., India. The overall objectives of the study were: (1) to investigate the communication pattern and its relationship with parameters like hierarchy, educational status and social relations: (2) to identify ‘technological gatekeepers’ and ‘isolates’ and study their characteristics and roles; (3) to study the role of informal communication vis-à-vis formal communication in problem-solving and idea-generation. In this paper, the first two aspects are discussed: the role of informal communication in problem-solving and idea-generation will be published in a subsequent paper.     

THE CASE AGAINST MELIORISM: VEILED TRAGEDIES, OR WHEN COST–BENEFIT ANALYSIS IS IN PRINCIPLE IMPOSSIBLE

The philosophy of meliorism seeks to spread the cost of the tragedies of the few over the many, thus easing the suffering of the few, while hardly burdening the many. The problem with this is that such cost-spreading itself causes tragedies, except that the tragedies are veiled – they are not only unknown; they cannot, in principle, be known. Thus meliorism distributes not from the tragic few to the ordinary many, but from the visibly tragic few to another group of tragic few, the latter group unseen and unknown, hence unable to complain about this state of affairs.     

Intrapreneurship model in the software industry

Quality & Quantity - The complexity of business dynamics demands that companies search for alternative ways to ensure their growth and survival. Thus intrapreneurship emerges as an ad-hoc...