An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Anti‐money Laundering and Anti‐terrorism Financing Legislation: Perceptions of Bank Compliance Officers in Malaysia

The present study sought to ascertain the perceptions of anti‐money laundering and counter‐financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance officers of banks in Malaysia in order to develop an understanding of how well they understand the risks and how well they have implemented the obligations imposed by the regime. We examine these issues for the first time in the literature via the theory of crying wolf. A structured questionnaire survey of compliance officers of banks in Malaysia was followed by focus group discussions held at the Malaysian Institute of Bankers. We expect that the industry would consider suitable steps to improve the compliance culture, particularly in Islamic banks, and the regulators would watch such banks more diligently. Banks considered avoiding penalties, improving brand image and improving customer perceptions to be the rationale for implementing the AML/CFT legislation. Most conventional bank officers considered their organisations’ compliance culture to be high or very high, while this was not found to be the case in Islamic banks.     

Non-addictive Habit Formation and the Equity Premium Puzzle

I analyse a model in a simple representative-agent economy with one risky and one riskless asset, populated by habit forming consumer-investors. These consumer-investors exhibit non-addictive habit formation in the sense that the current consumption rate of the consumer-investors can fall below their past habit-forming consumption rate. I endogenise the real riskless rate of return in this representative-agent economy and find that the equity premium puzzle is resolved for plausible values of the coefficient of relative risk aversion, the discount rate, and the intensity of non-addictive habit formation. These values have been validated in previous empirical or survey-based studies. Non-addictive habit-formation studied here complements and extends current research on habit-forming preferences. Given a constant investment opportunity set, the real riskless rate in the economy increases with relative risk aversion of the consumer and decreases as the habit-formation intensity increases. Extensions with time-varying investment opportunity sets could explain the low risk-free rate and the relatively large variability of the market return over the variability of the risk-free rate through time.     

Discrete forecast horizons for two-product variants of the dynamic lot-size problem

Motivated by the recent success of integer programming based procedures for computing discrete forecast horizons, we consider two-product variants of the classical dynamic lot-size model. In the first variant, we impose a warehouse capacity constraint on the total ending inventory of the two products in any period. In the second variant, the two products have both individual and joint setup costs for production. To our knowledge, there are no known procedures for computing forecast horizons for these variants.Under the assumption that future demands are discrete, we characterize forecast horizons for these two variants as feasibility/optimality questions in 0–1 mixed integer programs. A detailed computational study establishes the effectiveness of our approach and enables us to gain valuable insights into the behavior of minimal forecast horizons.     

Foreign Students and Graduate Economic Education in the United States

Of late, over half the Ph.D.'s awarded in economics in the United States have gone to foreigners. At the same time, time-to-completion of a Ph.D. has risen. The presence of many foreign students in graduate economics programs may provide some insight for this longer duration. This article explores this relationship and offers an explanation for the large number of foreign students studying in the United States.     

Structuring International Cooperative Ventures

We examine the effect of bargaining power and informationalasymmetry on the design of international cooperative venturesin the presence of restrictions on equity participation andinvestment. When the bargaining advantage rests with the multinational,equity participation restrictions can increase the profits todomestic firms and encourage suboptimal investment policies.Overinvestment occurs when the multinational's bargaining advantageis reinforced by an informational advantage, while underinvestmentoccurs when the domestic firm possesses the informational advantage.In contrast, when the bargaining advantage rests with the domesticfirm, equity participation restrictions do not affect investmentlevels.     

Developing Balanced Scorecard: Case of Three Construction Firms of Small Size

The article develops balanced scorecard (BSC) for three Indian construction firms of small size. All three firms could successfully implement BSC and realize benefits such as translating strategy into performance measures, tracking performance, cost reduction, revenue increase, and continuous improvement. The top management teams in all the firms were committed to the implementation of the BSC, and one member of the top management team was assigned a full-time responsibility for implementing it. There is a difference in choice of metrics for large and small firms in total number and types of metrics.     

MONEY AND GROWTH IN A RICARDO-VON NEUMANN-LEWIS WORLD

It is well known (Tobin (1965)) that in a monetary economy with full employment the monetary growth rate uniquely determines the steady-state capital intensity of the economy. This paper demonstrates that portfolio balance in a Ricardo-Von Neumann-Lewis world implies that the steady-state growth rate of the economy (the rate of capital accumulation) is uniquely determined by the rate of monetary growth. An increase in the monetary growth rate increases the steady-state inflation rate which, through its effect on savings, increases the equilibrium growth of the economy.     

Do Country Specific Bankruptcy Codes Determine Long‐term Financial Performance? The Case of Metallgesellschaft AG and Columbia Gas System

In this paper, we examine the impact of financial distress, the bankruptcy code, and related procedures on the long-term performance of two companies engaged in similar businesses across two countries. Both the companies were driven into bankruptcy as a result of unanticipated changes in energy prices. Though the resolution of bankruptcy of the US firm took a longer time, the post-reorganization performance of the firm has been excellent. In contrast, the post-reorganization performance of the German firm, which emerged out of bankruptcy in 2 weeks, has been poor. These results are consistent with the view that one of the important determinants of post-bankruptcy performance of a firm is more likely to be the underlying economic fundamentals rather than the country specific bankruptcy code through which the firm reorganizes.     

Do ATMs Increase Technical Efficiency of Banks in a Developing Country? Evidence from Indian Banks

Prior studies have confirmed that the greater the investment in information technology (IT), the better the performance of the firm. In the present study, we use bootstrap data envelopment analysis (DEA), which has previously been used in the accounting literature, and which has an edge over traditional accounting‐based measures, to compute the performance efficiency of Indian banks. Specifically, we measure the impact of automated teller machine (ATM) investment intensity on the production efficiency of Indian banks. We also study the impact of bank ownership, soundness, size and risk on efficiency. The study contributes to the literature on the productivity paradox and also draws on structure–conduct–performance theory. We find that ATM intensity has a significant negative association with bootstrap DEA technical efficiency. These results differ from prior research in developed countries. The results could be ascribed to heavy investment in IT such as ATMs by banks, and their inability to reduce labour costs given that many processes still continue to be manual. Accordingly, the study suggests that investment decisions with regard to IT need to be taken with great caution. If the related processes are not simultaneously automated, such investments are unlikely to yield the results that management may have envisaged.