spinoffs and wealth transfers the marriott case abstract this paper examines changes in bondholder and shareholder wealth resulting from the 1993 marriott spinoff it documents a wealth transfer from bondholders to shareholders and a decline in the total value of the firm following the spinoff announcement subsequent modifications to the spinoff plan reduced the bondholders loss but the value of marriott s notes and debentures remained 194 6 million below their pre announcement level on the distribution date industry adjusted shareholder gains during the same period were only 80 6 million transaction costs and inefficiencies resulting from the spinoff explain much of the decline in the total value of the firm

measuring the efficiency of energy intensive industries across european countries abstract this study evaluates the energy efficiency trends of five energy intensive industries in 23 european union eu countries over the period 2000 2009 in particular the performance of the construction electricity manufacturing mining and quarrying and transport sectors is examined the analysis is based on data envelopment analysis dea combined with the malmquist productivity index mpi which allows for distinctions between efficiency and technology changes over time at the second stage of the analysis cross classified multilevel modelling is applied to analyse the main drivers behind efficiency performance using a number of sector and country characteristics based on dea results an overall improvement in efficiency is observed in all sectors over the period the decomposition of the mpi indicates that technology change is primarily responsible for the improvements achieved in most sectors the results obtained by the cross classified model show among other things that the high electricity prices energy taxes and market share of the largest generator in the electricity market have a negative effect on industrial energy efficiency

board size and diversity as governance mechanisms in community development loan funds in the usa community development loan funds cdlfs in the us help revitalize low income communities by providing financial services to underserved populations this article uses recently available data from several surveys to explore the link between performance and board size and diversity given the unique nature of cdlfs specific hypotheses are formulated based on insights from the literature on governance in banks and nonprofit institutions to capture the cdlfs multiple objectives the article adapts an empirical approach used to study governance in banks the results show that efficiency improves as the board size increases up to 13 members the results also suggest that gender diversity has a positive impact while racial diversity is associated with a negative but negligibly small impact

analyst reputation communication and information acquisition earlier studies have shown that reputational concerns tend to reduce agents opportunistic behavior however a recent study by morris argued that analysts experts reputational concerns may discourage truthful communication when they try to avoid being perceived as being misaligned with investors in this paper i examine the effect of reputational concerns on communication in a setting where analysts can choose their precision endogenously because both misaligned and aligned analysts want investors to trust their reports in the future both will aim to build a reputation for being aligned in equilibrium aligned analysts will acquire more information than misaligned analysts as a result investors may favorably update their beliefs about the analysts type when the report is proven to be accurate therefore both types of analysts will have reputational incentives to communicate truthfully the paper also derives conditions under which the analysts reputational concerns have a nonmonotonic impact on aligned analysts equilibrium precision choices and investors welfare

institutional development and bank stability evidence from transition countries g21 p30 p34 p52 abstract this paper takes advantage of the dynamic nature of institutional reforms in transition economies and explores the causal effects of those reforms on bank risk using a difference in difference approach we show that banks financial stability increases substantially after these countries reform their legal insti tutions liberalize banking and restructure corporate governance we also find that the effects of legal and governance reforms on bank risk may critically depend on the progress of banking reforms a further examination of alternative risk measures reveals that the increases in financial stability among banks mainly come from the reduction of asset risk banks tend to have lower roa volatility and fewer nonper forming loans after reforming the institutional environment finally we split our sample into foreign and domestic banks and find that the enhancement of financial stability is more pronounced for domestic banks

corporate governance and the systemic risk a test of bundling hypothesis abstract we provide new evidence that the systemic risk of large banks is higher when the external and internal corporate governance mechanisms complement each other using a sample of large european banks from 2000 to 2016 we examine the relationship between various internal and external corporate governance mechanisms and the level of systemic risk specifically we analyze how monitoring by institutional investors complements or substitutes various board level governance mechanisms in determining systemic risk of a bank our empirical findings show that external institutional ownership and internal board level governance mechanisms complement each other to determine the level of systemic risk of a sample of domestic systemically important banks our results are robust to the alternative systemic risk measures and additional controls we conclude that banks have strategic flexibility in terms of configuring their corporate governance structures to attain similar levels of systemic risk

too many cooks committees in monetary policy how many people should decide about monetary policy in this paper we take an empirical perspective on this issue analyzing the relationship between the number of monetary policy decisionmakers and monetary policy outcomes using a new data set that characterizes monetary policy committees mpcs in more than 30 countries from 1960 through 2000 we find a u shaped relation between the membership size of mpcs and inflation our results suggest that the lowest level of inflation is reached at mpcs with about seven to ten members similar results are obtained for other measures such as inflation variability and output growth we also find that mpc size influences the success of monetary targeting regimes in contrast there is no evidence that either turnover rates of mpc members or the membership composition of mpcs affect economic outcomes

does trade liberalization increase national energy use abstract this paper utilises the theoretical principles of antweiler et al antweiler w b r copeland and m s taylor 2001 is free trade good for the environment american economic review 91 4 pp 877 908 to estimate empirically the linkages between trade liberalization and energy use focusing on scale technique and composition effects results suggest that trade will increase energy use for the mean country in the sample

the causality relationship between energy consumption and gdp in g 11 countries revisited abstract this paper explores whether energy conservation policies can be implemented in countries with the same level of development that is is restraining energy consumption without compromising economic growth feasible in all industrialized countries a new granger non causality testing procedure developed by toda and yamamoto 1995 journal of econometrics 66 225 250 is applied to re investigate the relationship if any between energy consumption and income in 11 major industrialized countries the results clearly do not support the view that energy consumption and income are neutral with respect to each other except in the case of the united kingdom germany and sweden where a neutral relationship is found bi directional causality in the united states and uni directional running from energy consumption to gdp in canada belgium the netherlands and switzerland are found this indicates that energy conservation may hinder economic growth in the latter five countries further the causality relationship appears to be uni directional but reversed for france italy and japan which implies that in these three countries energy conservation may be viable without being detrimental to economic growth

determinants of technical efficiency in the bioenergy industry in the eu28 region most previous bioenergy industry research has concentrated on how to implement a certain level of yield however few articles have paid attention to rational resource allocation to increase efficiency to enhance bioenergy production through proper use of available resources this study identified the effects of internal country specific and external macroeconomic determinants of technical efficiency level in the bioenergy industry for the eu28 region the study was established based on a conceptual framework suggesting a correlation between input use and level of technical efficiency a panel data analysis method was employed for the analysis and a panel regression analysis framework based on the fixed effect fe model and random effect re model was used to examine the potential determinants of technical efficiency level in the bioenergy industry for the eu28 region for the period between 1990 and 2013 the results indicate that the technical efficiency level of the bioenergy industry in developing countries is higher than in developed countries the empirical findings also suggest that technical efficiency has greater influence on pure technical efficiency levels capital input labor input gross domestic product inflation and interest rate significantly affected the technical efficiency of the bioenergy industry in the developing and developed countries in the eu28 region during the period of this study the findings clearly call for regulators and decision makers to review the technical efficiency level of the bioenergy industry within the eu28 region this study also provides better information and guidance to the boards of the bioenergy industry as they need to have a clear understanding of the influence technical efficiency has on bioenergy production performance moreover the results of this study have implications for investors who focus mainly on profits from their investments

use of eu structural funds for sustainable energy development in new eu member states more wide use of renewable energy sources res and increase in energy supply and use efficiency can make a valuable contribution to the meeting sustainable energy development targets the article presents a detailed overview of possibilities to use the eu structural funds available for new member states nms to finance sustainable energy projects and to overcome market failures related with negative externalities of pollution positive externalities of knowledge and adoption of new pollution reduction technologies and incomplete information the analysis of current situation of the use of eu structural funds sf for the implementation of sustainable energy projects in lithuania poland and check republic was performed based on ruse project results the proposals to enhance use of sf for sustainable energy projects in nms were developed

complements and substitutes in profiting from innovation a choice experimental approach the ability of firms to effectively use mechanisms that support them in profiting from technological innovation is key to outperforming competitors yet such mechanisms have for the most part been studied in isolation without accounting for interactions between them we address this gap by developing a conjoint based method to study such interactions and by applying it to analyze interactions between product related patents and three other appropriability mechanisms to this end we conduct and analyze a series of discrete choice experiments with 319 managers within a leading international communications equipment company as a result we find the number of product related patents to be complementary to the overall size of the patent portfolio and complementary with an interesting exception to contributions to open standards we also find indications of a substitutive interaction with lead time advantages hence the effectiveness of patents seems to be leveraged by controlled diffusion of the underlying technologies and by the size of the firm s patent portfolio a finding that may contribute to explaining the patent paradox theoretical and managerial implications are discussed

value relevance of tobin s q and corporate governance for the taiwanese tourism industry for knowledge and invention based industries scholars have introduced the firm value which is composed of traditional financial capital and intangible intellectual capital and tobin s q which is the commonly used approach for intellectual capital valuation scholars have thus evaluated firm valuation appropriately by considering corporate governance this study applies the multi regression model to present a discussion on the value relevance of intellectual capital and corporate governance concerning the tourism industry in taiwan the results show that intellectual capital is positively related to firm valuation and that corporate governance influences the positive relationship between intellectual capital and firm valuation the tourism industry must focus on intellectual capital and corporate governance

balancing search and stability interdependencies among elements of organizational design we examine how and why elements of organizational design depend on one another an agent based simulation allows us to model three design elements and two contextual variables that have rarely been analyzed jointly a vertical hierarchy that reviews proposals from subordinates an incentive system that rewards subordinates for departmental or firm wide performance the decomposition of an organization s many decisions into departments the underlying pattern of interactions among decisions and limits on the ability of managers to process information interdependencies arise among these features because of a basic general tension to be successful an organization must broadly search for good sets of decisions but it must also stabilize around good decisions once discovered an effective organization balances search and stability we identify sets of design elements that encourage broad search and others that promote stability the adoption of elements that encourage broad search typically raises the marginal benefit of other elements that provide offsetting stability hence the need to balance search and stability generates interdependencies among the design elements we pay special attention to interdependencies that involve the vertical hierarchy our findings confirm many aspects of conventional wisdom about vertical hierarchies but challenge or put boundary conditions on others we place limits for instance on the received wisdom that firm wide incentives and capable subordinates make top level oversight less valuable we also identify circumstances in which vertical hierarchies can lead to inferior long term performance

corporate governance a critical comparison among international theories codes of best practices and empirical research as strong role played by the financial g lobalized market several countries have adopted rules and principles best practice codes to be shared among all co mpanies in order to provide tools to solve governance problems regulate relations among managers and shareholders this paper seeks to investigate american english german japanese and italian codes of conduct literature agrees that corporate governance archetypes are those anglo saxon and german japanese on the other hand the italian model represents an interesting case study these three models are based on different international theories agency stakeholder resource dependence and stewardship scholars maintain that the agency theory is the most valid of the theories with respect to the existence of international convergence processes thus the objective of the paper is twofold first of all we want to understand which international theory has been adopted by anglo saxon german japanese and italian codes secondly we wish to verify whether empirical research confirms principle efficacy contained in codes of corporate governance from a co mparat ive study among international theories and rules it would emerge that variables contained in the codes would be better explained and regulated under agency approach it should be noted however that each country in spite of the convergence processes towards a single standard of rules is affected by their social and economic background finally we could argue that empirical studies do not often explain critical success factors in the same way of codes although both are the result of best practices

board structure and firm technical efficiency evidence from canadian state owned enterprises abstract the objective of the study is to analyze the board performance relationship for a group of 14 canadian soes this context is unique because soes do not have major control devices other than the board as the interaction effect if any between the board and other corporate governance structures is expected to be low we do not have to fully control for the potential impact of different control devices or to disentangle them completely from influencing board composition the performance is also measured using data envelopment analysis dea a linear programming method used for the first time in this research area as such this study contributes to the operational research literature while applying dea method to untraditional fields of research the results from the multivariate analysis suggest that board size and board independence are positively related to firm technical efficiency only when soes are exposed to market discipline in other words product market competition is a precondition for boards to be effective

takeover contests toeholds and deterrence we consider a setting in which two potential buyers one with a prior toehold and one without compete in a takeover modeled as an ascending auction with participating costs the toeholder is more aggressive during the takeover process because she is also a seller of her own shares the non toeholder anticipates this extra aggressiveness of the toeholder thus he is deterred from participating unless he has a high valuation for the target company this leads to large inefficiency losses for many configurations expected target returns are first increasing then decreasing in the size of the toehold

do depositors punish banks for bad behavior market discipline deposit insurance and banking crises this paper empirically investigates two issues largely unexplored by the literature on market discipline we evaluate the interaction between market discipline and deposit insurance and the impact of banking crises on market discipline we focus on the experiences of argentina chile and mexico during the 1980s and 1990s we find that depositors discipline banks by withdrawing deposits and by requiring higher interest rates deposit insurance does not appear to diminish the extent of market discipline aggregate shocks affect deposits and interest rates during crises regardless of bank fundamentals and investors responsiveness to bank risk taking increases in the aftermath of crises

corporate financial policy and corporate control abstract this paper presents evidence that stockholder wealth declines on average when managers respond to attempted hostile takeovers with defensive changes in asset and ownership structure the data also indicate that these corporate restructurings are typically quite large and that many are attempts by managers to create barriers specific to the hostile bidder and or to consolidate a block of voting securities in the hands of management allies the evidence suggests that defensive motives whether beneficial or harmful influence corporate asset and ownership structure

the gender gap in pay in company boards the aim of this study is to analyze whether a gender wage gap exists in the boards of directors bd of companies listed on the madrid stock exchange from 2004 to 2011 we hypothesize that the percentage of female directors on a bd the presence of female directors on the nomination and compensation committee the presence of well qualified independent women directors on bd the sector and the geographical region have an effect on the gender wage gap the results show that the percentage of female directors on a bd and the geographical region have no effect on the gender wage gap on the other hand the finding reports that women s presence on the nomination and compensation committee increases the gender gap in pay and it is reduced when there are independent female directors who have gained a degree on the bd and when the company operates in the finance and real estate services sector in addition the results also demonstrate that the seniority of the female directors decreases the gender gap in pay while there is a rise when the companies are bigger and the size of the bd and the return on assets increase these conclusions should encourage regulatory bodies to adopt forceful rules to mitigate the gender gap in pay

underlying causal factors of the european union energy intensity econometric evidence abstract the aim of the research is to determine the main factors that define the level of energy intensity in the countries of the european union the research was conducted by estimation of six baseline and six auxiliary regressions with and without time lags in form of one way fixed and random effects error component models on different unbalanced panel data samples covering the period 1995 2015 the obtained baseline regressions results generate three sets of findings the first set consists of extremely robust findings relating to the positive influence of gross fixed capital formation and industrial gross value added and negative effects of real per capita gross domestic product and oil products retail price these variables are statistically significant in all 36 baseline empirical models the second set of results consists of quite robust findings relating to insignificant influence of foreign direct investment and negative influence of coal price according to the results it cannot be confirm the hypothesis of energy saving technology transfer via foreign direct investments in european union member states the third set of results shows that the research has failed to generate any robust findings for economic openness import ratio urbanization and natural gas price which means that the effect of these determinants on energy intensity in european union member states is unspecified finally auxiliary regressions estimation results show that changes in the sectorial composition within the european union member states economies have not enhanced energy saving technological transfer via foreign direct investments

srisk a conditional capital shortfall measure of systemic risk we introduce srisk to measure the systemic risk contribution of a financial firm srisk measures the capital shortfall of a firm conditional on a severe market decline and is a function of its size leverage and risk we use the measure to study top financial institutions in the recent financial crisis srisk delivers useful rankings of systemic institutions at various stages of the crisis and identifies fannie mae freddie mac morgan stanley bear stearns and lehman brothers as top contributors as early as 2005 q1 moreover aggregate srisk provides early warning signals of distress in indicators of real activity received june 7 2011 accepted april 18 2016 by editor geert bekaert

economic and psychological perspectives on ceo compensation a review and synthesis to many the principal agent model is the obvious lens through which executive pay should be viewed such a sentiment sits uncomfortably with a large number of empirical studies suggesting that the process of determining executive pay seems to be more readily explained by recourse to arguments of managerial power and influence this article investigates the micro underpinnings of boardroom behavior in order to explain this departure from principal agency theory s argument that executive compensation serves to align interests between the owners of the company and its senior managers we find that there are strong interaction effects among social influence variables and the social setting of boardroom activity generous pay awards bearing only a weak connection to corporate performance are explained in the context of the social psychology of the boardroom these results and a review of the empirical research suggest the need for a more comprehensive model of executive compensation that incorporates both economic and psychological determinants copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

corporate governance of banks a survey this paper reviews the empirical literature on the corporate governance of banks we start by highlighting the main differences between banks and nonfinancial firms and focus on three characteristics that make banks special i regulation ii the capital structure of banks and iii the complexity and opacity of their business and structure next we discuss the characteristics of corporate governance in banks and how they differ from the governance of nonfinancial firms we then review the evidence on three governance mechanisms i boards ii ownership structures and iii executive compensation our review suggests that some of the empirical regularities found in the literature on corporate governance of nonfinancial institutions such as the positive negative association between board independence size and performance do not hold for banks also existing work provides no conclusive results regarding the relationship between different governance mechanisms and various measures for banks performance we discuss potential explanations for these mixed results

institutional ownership stability and bhc performance abstract in this study the association between performance of bhcs and institutional ownership stability is investigated and contrasted to those found for the less regulated utility and industrial firms in order to determine whether regulation displaces owner monitoring we employ a simultaneous equations model treating firm performance and institutional ownership stability as endogenous variables several results are obtained first bhc performance is positively associated with institutional ownership stability second this association is weaker for bhcs than for comparable utility and industrial firms possibly because of the substitution of regulation for owner monitoring in banking third this association is stronger in the recent deregulated years and for bhcs with lower likelihood of regulatory intervention

is it inefficient investment that causes the diversification discount diversified conglomerates are valued less than matched portfolios of pure play firms recent studies find that this diversification discount results from conglomerates inefficient allocation of capital expenditures across divisions much of this work uses tobin s q as a proxy for investment opportunities therefore hypothesizing that q is a good proxy this paper treats measurement error in q using a measurement error consistent estimator on the sorts regressions in the literature i find no evidence of inefficient allocation of investment the results in the literature appear to be artifacts of measurement error and of the correlation between investment opportunities and liquidity diversif ied conglomerates appear to trade at a discount relative to matched portfolios of pure play firms studies documenting this stylized fact include lang and stulz 1994 berger and ofek 1995 comment and jarrell 1995 and servaes 1996 recent empirical work has sought to find the source of this diversification discount building on the theoretical work in milgrom and roberts 1990 stein 1997 and scharfstein and stein 2000 on the inefficiency of internal capital markets this literature has asked specifically whether diversified firms allocate their capital expenditures inefficiently across divisions the canonical answer has been yes and has been supported by two types of evidence first studies such as lamont 1997 shin and stulz 1998 shin and park 1998 and rajan servaes and zingales 2000 all find that internal capital markets in conglomerates transfer funds across divisions in a suboptimal manner second studies such as berger and ofek and scharfstein 1998 provide evidence suggesting that the divisions of conglomerates do not respond adequately to investment opportunities in comparison to single segment firms however these findings about divisional investment may be an artifact of measurement error most of these studies rely on tobin s q the market value of the capital stock divided by its replacement value as a proxy for investment opportunities and tobin s q is likely to be a poor proxy shin and stulz

performance and governance in microfinance institutions accepted version of article published in the journal journal of banking finance published version available on science direct http dx doi org 10 1016 j jbankfin 2008 11 009

institutional investor stability and crash risk monitoring versus short termism this study tests two opposing views of institutional investors monitoring versus short termism we present evidence that institutional investor stability is negatively associated with 1 year ahead stock price crash risk consistent with the monitoring theory of institutional investors but not the short termism theory our findings are shown to be robust to alternative empirical specifications estimation methods and endogeneity concerns in addition we find that institutional ownership by public pension funds bank trusts investment companies and independent investment advisors is significantly negatively positively associated with future crash risk consistent with findings that pension funds more actively monitor management than other types of institutions

does fdi influence renewable energy consumption an analysis of sectoral fdi impact on renewable and non renewable industrial energy consumption this study examines the link between foreign direct investment fdi and energy demand fdi is a source of financing that allows businesses to grow at the same time fdi can be a source of innovation that promotes energy efficiency existing evidence on the impact of aggregate fdi inflows on energy consumption is scarce and inconclusive in the current study we disaggregate fdi inflows into mining manufacturing total services and financial services components and examine the impact of these fdi flows on renewable and non renewable industrial energy sources for 74 countries for the period 1985 2012 we employ a blundell bond dynamic panel estimator to control for endogeneity and omitted variable biases in our panels the results point broadly to an energy consumption reducing effect with respect to non renewable sources of energy and an energy consumption augmenting effects with respect to renewable energy we find that these effects vary in magnitude and significance by sectoral fdi

optimal toeholds in takeover contests abstract we offer an explanation for why raiders do not acquire the maximum possible toehold prior to announcing a takeover bid by endogenously modeling the target firm s value following an unsuccessful takeover we demonstrate that a raider may optimally acquire a small toehold even if the acquisition does not drive up the pre tender target price this occurs because although a larger toehold increases profits if the takeover succeeds it also conveys a higher level of managerial entrenchment and hence a lower firm value if the takeover fails we derive new predictions regarding the optimal toehold and target value following a failed takeover we also examine the impact of a rival bidder and dilution

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

endogeneity and the dynamics of internal corporate governance abstract we use a well developed dynamic panel generalized method of moments gmm estimator to alleviate endogeneity concerns in two aspects of corporate governance research the effect of board structure on firm performance and the determinants of board structure the estimator incorporates the dynamic nature of internal governance choices to provide valid and powerful instruments that address unobserved heterogeneity and simultaneity we re examine the relation between board structure and performance using the gmm estimator in a panel of 6 000 firms over a period from 1991 to 2003 and find no causal relation between board structure and current firm performance we illustrate why other commonly used estimators that ignore the dynamic relationship between current governance and past firm performance may be biased we discuss where it may be appropriate to consider the dynamic panel gmm estimator in corporate governance research as well as caveats to its use

information asymmetry valuation and the corporate spin off decision we empirically analyze the information hypothesis that the separation of a rm s divisions into independently traded units through a spin o enhances value because it mitigates information asymmetry about the rm consistent with this hypothesis we nd that rms that engage in spin o s have higher levels of information asymmetry compared to their industry and size matched counterparts and the information problems decrease signi cantly after the spin o the gains around spin o s are positively related to the degree of information asymmetry and this relation is more pronounced for rms with fewer negative synergies between divisions finally rms with higher growth opportunities and rms in need of external capital show a higher propensity to engage in spin o s they also raise more capital following a spin o which is consistent with the view that

location decisions of foreign banks and competitor remoteness this paper examines the role of competitor remoteness the weighted average distance of all competing banks to a host country on the location decision of a foreign bank it uses unique bilateral data on 1 199 foreign banks from 75 home countries present in 110 host countries it finds that besides bilateral distance competitor remoteness importantly drives foreign banks location decisions the impact of distance and competitor remoteness is stronger for non oecd home and host countries when the scale of foreign bank inward and outward investment is limited and for host countries where foreign banks dominate

board structure and executive pay evidence from the uk we examine the impact of board structure on executive pay for 1 880 uk public firms over the period 1983 2002 using panel data analysis first the proportion of non executive directors tends to decrease the rate of increase in executive pay whereas board size tends to increase it second the proportion of non executives strengthens the relation between the rate of increase in executive pay and changes in performance in particular although for firms in general the pay performance link is much weaker when performance is poor a higher proportion of non executives strengthens this link considerably finally firms that increase the number of nonexecutives in order to comply with the cadbury code of 1992 experience both a decline in the rate of increase in executive pay and an increase in pay performance sensitivity

the effect of physician board membership on uncompensated care provision previous studies indicate that nonprofit and for profit hospitals provide comparable levels of uncompensated care when taking into account their sizes this evidence suggests that for profit hospitals extract some indirect benefit when providing uncompensated care our article investigates how physician board membership affects uncompensated care provision with data for hospitals in california from 1997 to 2010 we estimate a fixed effect model where uncompensated care is a function of physician board membership other board attributes as well as hospital characteristics our results indicate that physician board membership in for profit hospitals relates positively with uncompensated care provision prior evidence such as goldstein and ward 2004 and molinari et al 1995 has shown that involving physicians in strategic decisions improves hospitals financial performance our results reinforce the notion that having physicians in leadership or strategic positions benefits for profit hospitals in

the cyclical behaviour of european bank capital buffers using an unbalanced panel of accounting data from 1997 to 2004 and controlling for individual bank costs and risk we find capital buffers of the banks in the eu15 have a significant negative co movement with the cycle for banks in the accession countries there is significant positive co movement capital buffers of commercial and savings banks and of large banks exhibit negative co movement those of co operative and smaller banks exhibit positive co movement speeds of adjustment are fairly slow we interpret these results and discuss policy implications noting that negative co movement of capital buffers will exacerbate the pro cyclical impact of basel ii

foreign direct investment and decoupling between energy and gross domestic product in developing countries on a sample of 20 developing countries we noticed a clear decline in the energy intensity as foreign direct investment increases the reason for that probably is the use of modern technologies that came with foreign direct investment i e a leapfrogging over the old fashioned traditional technologies in use in these countries

spin offs divestitures and conglomerate investment we examine whether spin offs or divestitures cause improvements in conglomerate investment efficiency at issue are endogeneity of these restructuring decisions and correct measurement of investment efficiency endogeneity is a problem because the factors that induce firms to spin off or divest divisions may also improve investment efficiency measurement error is a problem because efficiency measures employ tobin s q as a noisy proxy for investment opportunities we find important differences between firms that divest or spin off and a control sample after accounting for these differences and for measurement error in q we find no evidence of improvements in investment efficiency

the role of the board of directors in disseminating relevant information on greenhouse gases in today s world the corporate image of the largest companies is closely linked to their performance in the field of corporate social responsibility and the disclosure of information on that topic specifically on climate change since the board of directors is the body responsible for this process the aim of this article is to show the role that companies boards of directors play in the accountability process vis a vis stakeholders in relation to one specific aspect which has enormous significance in environmental information practices used to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in order to achieve this we shall verify certain business characteristics in addition to the size and activity of the board of directors and we shall take different dependence models into consideration these models will include variables related to the level of independence and diversity of the board of directors which interact with dummy variables representing the company s litigation risks regarding environmental behavior and the institutional macro context of the organization s country of origin the results make it clear that boards of directors are basically focused on the traditional responsibility of creating economic value instead of dealing with today s broader business world concepts which include social responsibility this focus therefore does not favor the accountability process before other stakeholders if this makes it more difficult to protect the interests of shareholders

the costs of antimerger lawsuits abstract this paper presents tests of the hypothesis that the relief imposed in antimerger cases is costly for defendant firms stockholders previous research on this subject suggests that defendants case related losses are due entirely to legal expenses and the disruption of productive activity in this paper it is shown that two out of five portfolios of defendant firms earn abnormal losses when final decisions in antimerger cases are announced these losses are consistent with the imposition of costly constraints on some defendants by government antitrust enforcers the tests also show that when acquisitions are canceled following antimerger complaints the losses to the target firms are substantial and completely offset the gains generated when the acquisitions are proposed

divisional diversity and the conglomerate discount evidence from spinoffs abstract existing literature argues that disparity in investment opportunities within diversified firms can erode firm value we investigate the diversity cost hypothesis of spinoffs by using post spinoff data to 1 reconstruct the diversified firm after the spinoff and assess the aggregate improvement in value and 2 relate any value improvements to changes in diversity we find that improvements in aggregate value depend significantly on changes in both a direct measure of diversity and measures based on industry proxies we conclude that diversification discounts at least partially reflect a value loss due to the diversified nature of the firm itself rather than selection bias or measurement error

investor protection and corporate governance recent research has documented large differences among countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms in the breadth and depth of capital markets in dividend policies and in the access of firms to external finance a common element to the explanations of these differences is how well investors both shareholders and creditors are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms we describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries discuss the possible origins of these differences summarize their consequences and assess potential strategies of corporate governance reform we argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank centered and market centered financial systems

asymmetric impacts of the determinants of energy intensity in nigeria abstract this study analysed the problem of energy intensity determinants in nigeria based on the fully modified ols and canonical cointegration regressions these methods were preferred since they are able to deal effectively with the second order bias problems an often characteristics of time series data the impacts of price of crude oil fdi trade openness and industry structure are asymmetric which suggests the presence of structural effects in parameters the impact of crude oil price is negative but becomes stronger post 1989 saving 126 more in energy consumption relative to pre 1989 also the impacts of fdi and trade openness are negative and significant but become stronger post 1989 saving 11 2 and 0 8 more in energy consumption relative to the baseline respectively for every one percentage point increase in fdi and trade openness the impact of industry value added is positive and significant but weakens after 1989 consuming 1 8 less in energy for every one percentage point increase in industry value added relative to the baseline the energy reducing effect of industry value added post 1989 reflects improvements in the technical characteristics of industrial sector in nigeria last the result showed that the absorptive capability and industry characteristics of nigeria are important determinants of how fdi affects energy intensity this implies that a more integrated fdi programme considering the country characteristics rather than a one fit all programme is preferable

capital shortfall a new approach to ranking and regulating systemic risks the financial crisis of 2007 2009 has given way to the sovereign debt crisis of 2010 2012 yet many of the banking issues remain the same we discuss a method to estimate the capital that a financial firm would need to raise if we have another financial crisis this measure of capital shortfall is based on publicly available information but is conceptually similar to the stress tests conducted by us and european regulators we argue that this measure summarizes the major characteristics of systemic risk and provides a reliable interpretation of the past and current financial crises

energy and economic growth in industrializing countries the case of greece abstract this paper investigates some aspects of the interrelated paths of economic growth and energy demand in the case of an industrializing economy through the use of numerous econometric models translog functions have helped establish that income and price elasticities of energy two critical parameters in the energy economy interaction exhibit falling trends with time the value share of the industrial sector is strongly associated with both energy demand and energy intensity any increase in the former will lead to amplified increases in the latter rendering the continuation of past trends in industrial expansion questionable under conditions of high energy costs substitution among capital labour and energy does take place though to a limited extent as indicated by the aggregate measure of energy non energy substitution elasticity all findings appear to suggest that energy policymaking in an industrializing country like greece will be of low effectiveness until certain structural changes in the economy are realized

does renewable and or non renewable energy consumption matter for total factor productivity tfp growth evidence from the brics abstract studies proved that output growth is mainly associated with the total factor productivity tfp growth and variables that affect the tfp have an important explanatory power on output in this regards the aim of this study is to examine the causal relationship between different types of energy consumption and tfp growth in the brics from 1992 to 2012 a panel bootstrap granger causality test by konya 2006 68 was employed to investigate the direction of possible connection between energy consumption and tfp growth results show that no remarkable causal link exists between renewable energy consumption and tfp growth in the brics however in the case of non renewables energy consumption creates a positive externality that contributes economic development in brazil and south africa by the growth of tfp as well as energy use itself in this respect policies that promote coal and non renewable electricity consumption in south africa and natural gas consumption in brazil may be beneficial for their economic development

does urbanization lead to less energy use and lower co2 emissions a cross country analysis despite the relationship between urbanization energy use and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to differences in development stages or income levels most previous studies have implicitly assumed that the impact of urbanization is homogenous for all countries this assumption can be questionable as there are many characteristic differences among countries of different levels of affluence this paper investigates empirically the effects of urbanization on energy use and co2 emissions with consideration of the different development stages using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model and a balanced panel dataset of 99 countries over the period 1975 2005 the findings suggest that the impact of urbanization on energy use and emissions varies across the stages of development surprisingly urbanization decreases energy use in the low income group while it increases energy use in the middle and high income groups the impact of urbanization on emissions is positive for all the income groups but it is more pronounced in the middle income group than in the other income groups these novel findings not only help advance the existing literature but also can be of special interest to policy makers and urban planners

do urbanization and industrialization affect energy intensity in developing countries abstract against a backdrop of concerns about climate change peak oil and energy security issues reducing energy intensity is often advocated as a way to at least partially mitigate these impacts this study uses recently developed heterogeneous panel regression techniques like mean group estimators and common correlated effects estimators to model the impact that income urbanization and industrialization has on energy intensity for a panel of 76 developing countries in the long run a 1 increase in income reduces energy intensity by 0 45 to 0 35 long run industrialization elasticities are in the range 0 07 to 0 12 the impact of urbanization on energy intensity is mixed in specifications where the estimated coefficient on urbanization is statistically significant it is slightly larger than unity the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

evidence on how academics manage their portfolio of knowledge transfer activities abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore whether six broad categories of knowledge transfer activities undertaken by academics the creation and diffusion of knowledge through publications transmission of knowledge through teaching informal knowledge transfer patenting spin off formation and consulting activities are complementary substitute or independent as well as the conditions under which complementarities substitution and independence among these activities are likely to emerge this investigation relied on data regarding 1554 researchers funded by the natural sciences and engineering research council of canada contrary to prior studies which have examined complementarities and the determinants of knowledge transfer activities in separate models this study relied on a multivariate path model to reflect the fact that in practice academics consider simultaneously whether or not to undertake multiple knowledge transfer activities overall the results point to the existence of three very different types of knowledge transfer portfolios of activities a first portfolio made up of complementary activities which are interdependent and reinforce each other this portfolio includes publications patenting spin off creation consulting and informal knowledge transfer a second portfolio includes teaching activities and publication outputs which are substitute for each other a third portfolio comprises teaching activities and other activities independent from teaching namely patenting spin off creation consulting and informal knowledge transfer each of these three portfolios of knowledge transfer activities emerged under different conditions implications are derived for managerial practice and future research

estimating the linkage between energy efficiency and productivity abstract many analyses have referred to industrial productivity benefits associated with energy efficiency that are at least as great or larger than the energy benefits if plants with higher energy intensity also tend to have lower productivity then energy policy needs to consider this this study examines this issue for two segments of the glass industry using plant level data from the census bureau productivity is defined by the difference in best practice production efficiency as measured by data envelopment analysis dea this study uses regression analysis to estimate how differences in plant level electricity and fossil fuel intensity i e energy use per unit of production are attributable to differences in plant level productivity and other economic variables like energy prices and cumulative production in every case productivity differences between plants are statistically significant in explaining differences in plant energy intensity the coefficient that links productivity to energy efficiency yields a less than proportional impact for only one industry and fuel type for others the relationship is implies that a 1 increase in productivity increase energy efficiency by more than 1 this effect is statistically significant for flat glass but not container glass the estimates of the price and learning by doing coefficients seem reasonable but without imposing the assumption that all plants in the industry are equally productive this lends further credence to a significant relationship between productivity and energy efficiency

misperceiving interactions among complements and substitutes organizational consequences systems composed of activity choices that interact in nonsimple ways can allow firms to create and sustain a competitive advantage however in complex systems decision makers may not always have a precise understanding of the exact strength of the interaction between activities likewise incentive and accounting systems may lead decision makers to ignore or misperceive interactions this paper studies formally the consequences of misperceiving interaction effects between activity choices our results suggest that misperceptions with respect to complements are more costly than with respect to substitutes as a result firms should optimally invest more to gather information about interactions among complementary activities e g concerning network effects than about interactions among substitute activities similarly the use of division based incentive schemes appears to be more advisable for divisions whose products are substitutes than for divisions that produce complements it is further shown that system fragility is not necessarily positively correlated with the strength ofthe interaction between choices while systems of complements become increasingly fragile as the strength of interaction increases systems of substitutes can become increasingly stable

systemic risk and bank size abstract in this paper we analyse firm level systemic risk for us and european banks from 2004 to 2012 we observe that common systemic risk indicators are primarily driven by firm size which implies an overriding concern for too big to fail institutions however smaller banks may still pose considerable systemic threats as exemplified by the northern rock debacle in 2007 by introducing a simple standardisation we obtain new risk measures that often prove to be superior predictors of financial distress during the 2007 2009 subprime crisis we conclude that the new measures could be a valuable addition to the existing indicators employed in basel iii to identify systemically important banks

pre tender offer share acquisition strategy in takeovers this paper models the strategic pre tender offer share acquisition problem faced by po tential bidders in takeovers the model provides a rational explanation for the seemingly anomalous empirical evidence that the information about the impending tender offers is not fully conveyed through the potential bidders pre tender offer trades and for the evidence that a large fraction of bidders do not hold any target shares prior to launching the tender offers additional testable implications are also provided

the growth profit nexus in this paper we investigate the relative importance of firm and market effects on the profitability of a sample of independent unquoted u k firms over the period 1991 1993 specifically we attempt to isolate the effects of internal governance given that the typical firm is closely held in terms of its shareholdings and has a high degree of owner control our findings suggest that there is no short run growth profit trade off of the type outlined by marris in fact growth and profits move in parallel further there is a significant degree of profits persistence

revisiting agency theory evidence of board independence and agency cost from bangladesh this study examines the influence of board independence on firm agency cost among listed firms in bangladesh which feature concentrated ownership and high insider representation on corporate boards this study uses three measures of agency cost the expense ratio the q free cash flow interaction and the asset utilization ratio the finding of the study is that board independence can reduce the firm agency cost only under asset utilization ratio measure of agency cost these findings are robust to several robustness tests furthermore the non linearity tests suggest that the benefit of outside independent directors is generally plausible as a factor controlling agency costs in the case of a medium level of board independence overall these findings do not reject the validity of agency theory supporting the anglo american orthodoxy promoting outside independent directors as good monitors

larger board size and decreasing firm value in small firms1 abstract several studies hypothesize a relation between board size and financial performance empirical tests of the relation exist in only a few studies of large u s firms we find a significant negative correlation between board size and profitability in a sample of small and midsize finnish firms finding a board size effect for a new and different class of firms affects the range of explanations for the board size effect

energy intensity in the iron and steel industry a comparison of physical and economic indicators abstract energy consumption of the iron and steel industry is examined in seven countries brazil china france germany japan poland and the united states for the period 1980 1991 using a decomposition analysis based on physical indicators for process type and product mix we decompose intra sectoral structural changes and efficiency improvements specific energy consumption decreased in all countries except poland efficiency improvement played a key role in brazil china germany and the us while structural changes were the main driver for energy savings in france and japan we also compare the use of various economic indicators to physical indicators and find that they do not track physical developments well in poland or the developing countries we studied in the industrialized countries value added based energy intensity indicators generally reflect the specific energy consumption better than other economic indicators although large differences occur in individual years we found a smaller correlation between other economic indicators gross output and value of shipments and specific energy consumption we conclude that use of physical energy intensity indicators improves comparability between countries provides greater information for policy makers regarding intra sectoral structural changes and provides detailed explanations for observed changes in energy intensity

united arab emirates fdi outlook fdi is important in building a sustainable and diversified knowledge based uae economy the stock of fdi grew at an average annual growth rate of 45 3 percent over the past decade reaching us 95 billion or nearly 27 percent of gdp in 2012 fdi flows have not recovered from the global financial crises most fdi stock is concentrated in finance construction and real estate recent greenfield fdi is concentrated in construction while more than half of top m a deals took place in finance transportation communications and utilities the list of top oecd home countries for fdi flows to the uae include italy germany chile united kingdom luxembourg france united states and belgium though uae investment policy limits foreign investment and reduces competition the government has undertaken reforms and contracted investment treaties that have encouraged investment efforts are under way to speed up the ratification of a new foreign investment law which removes several of the current legal barriers to fdi and offers foreign investors similar rights to those of uae nationals the uae has high fdi potential with plenty of room for improving fdi performance and benefiting the economy

choice interactions and business strategy choice settings are strategic to the extent that they entail cross sectional or intertemporal linkages these same factors may impose daunting demands on decision makers we develop a graph theoretic generalization of the nk model of fitness landscapes to model the way in which policy choices may be more or less strategic we use this structure to examine through simulation how fully articulated a strategy or set of policy choices must be to achieve a high level of performance and how feasible it is to offset past strategic mistakes through tactical adjustments instead of alignment our analysis highlights the role of asymmetry in the interaction of strategic choices and in particular the degree to which choices vary in terms of being influential dependent or autonomous from other choices

are internal capital markets efficient using segment information from compustat we find that the investment by a segment of a diversified firm depends on the cash flow of the firm s other segments but significantly less than it depends on its own cash flow the investment by segments of highly diversified firms is less sensitive to their cash flow than the investment of comparable single segment firms the sensitivity of a segment s investment to the cash flow of other segments does not depend on whether its investment opportunities are better than those of the firm s other segments

information in tender offers with a large shareholder we study takeovers of firms whose ownership structure is a mixture of minority block holders and small shareholders we show that the combination of dispersed private information on the side of small shareholders and the presence of a large shareholder can facilitate profitable takeovers furthermore our analysis implies that even if some model of takeovers predicts a profit for the raider for example due to private benefits the profit will be underestimated unless the large shareholder and the dispersion of information among the small shareholders are modeled

convertible bonds issued in the bear market period evidence from taiwan we argue that the behaviour of enterprises might be modified or even changed completely after black swan events occur we explore why high tech firms preferred to issue convertible bonds in 2001 2003 the bear market period after the tech bubble in taiwan we show that firms issuing convertible bonds are those with low directors holding ratio and high debt ratio results also reveal that corporate governance was worse in the firms that issued convertible bonds as revealed by the finding that the directors holding ratio of these issuing firms declined considerably this finding also implies that corporate governance issues become more serious after black swan events

toehold strategies takeover laws and rival bidders abstract prior to the announcement of a tender offer the bidding firm is legally allowed to acquire shares in the open market subject to some limitations these pre announcement purchases are known as toeholds this paper presents a simple model that describes the bidder s optimal toehold acquisition strategy within an environment that closely parallels the present legal institutions the model shows that toeholds and bids interact in a complex manner even without the presence of asymmetric information by examining a simple environment the paper provides a useful alternative hypothesis for tests of other presumably more complex models one of the main implications of our model is that if no competing bidders are expected no toeholds should be purchased the paper also demonstrates that the correct specification of an empirical model can be critical for example under some parameter values toehold purchases may exhibit a negative cross sectional correlation with the pre announcement run up in the stock price this occurs even though prices are strictly increasing the size of the toehold several implications concerning various aspects of merger legislation are considered for example we demonstrate that a rule similar to a fair price provision has the desirable property that a second bidder arrives and wins if and only if he places a higher value on the target than the initial bidder

effects of changing trade structure and technical characteristics of the manufacturing sector on energy intensity in ghana abstract this study examined the effects of changing trade structure and changing technical characteristics of the manufacturing sector alongside the effects of foreign direct investment and urbanization on energy intensity in ghana in order to produce a result that is not biased towards non rejection the zivot andrews unit root test with structural break was used the study applied the phillip hansen park and stock watson cointegration models which are more robust to serial correlation and exogeneity problems preliminary findings showed evidence of cointegration the study concludes that the changing technical characteristics of the manufacturing sector after the reform and changing production mix in favor of less energy intensive improved energy efficiency however energy consumption via exports which outweighed the energy saving via imports of capital goods after the reform in 1983 worsened energy efficiency growing urbanization significantly increases energy intensity in all technological diffusion via trade exerts significant influence on energy intensity than technological diffusion via foreign direct investment these results are robust to the cholesky variance decomposition analysis

monotone comparative statics under uncertainty this paper analyzes monotone comparative statics predictions in several classes of stochastic optimization problems the main results characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for comparative statics predictions to hold based on properties of primitive functions that is utility functions and probability distributions the results apply when the primitives satisfy one of the following two properties i a single crossing property which arises in applications such as portfolio investment problems and auctions or ii log supermodularity which arises in the analysis of demand functions affiliated random variables stochastic orders and orders over risk aversion

bank sovereign risk spillovers in the european debt crisis this paper investigates contagion between bank risk and sovereign risk in europe over the period 2006 2011 since this period covers various stages of the banking and sovereign crisis it oers a fertile ground to analyze bank sovereign risk spillovers we de ne contagion as excess correlation i e correlation between banks and sovereigns over and above what is explained by common factors using cds spreads at the bank and at the sovereign level moreover we investigate the determinants of contagion by analyzing bank speci c as well as country speci c variables and their interaction we provide empirical evidence that various contagion channels are at work including a strong home bias in bank bond portfolios using the eba s disclosure of sovereign exposures of banks we nd that banks with a weak capital and or funding position are particularly vulnerable to risk spillovers at the country level the debt ratio is the most important driver of contagion

how do industrialization and trade openness influence energy intensity evidence from a path model in case of bangladesh abstract nowadays multifaceted interdependence between macroeconomic variables results in an extended list of factors that have diverse impacts on energy intensity thus sustaining energy intensity at a desired level demands advanced studies to investigate the multifarious influences of its factors and ensure proactive measures to deal with them this paper aims to set up a path model to analyze the direct and indirect impacts of industrialization and trade openness on energy intensity in bangladesh the results corroborate that industrialization has a direct positive influence on energy intensity where trade openness shows a direct negative effect on it and both industrialization and trade openness have negative indirect impact on energy intensity through technological innovation and economic growth respectively in case of individual total impacts only industrialization affects energy intensity positively where trade openness technological innovation and economic growth negatively do based on the empirical results some policy implications regarding energy intensity and effects of its factors on it are also presented

environmental regulation and foreign direct investment evidence from south korea abstract this paper studies how environmental regulation shapes the pattern of foreign direct investment fdi and thereby assesses the pollution haven hypothesis conflicting results exist in the case studies examining the most advanced countries partly due to the deterrent effect of clean technology adoptions on industry migration to minimize the clean technology effect we examine the pattern of south korean fdi over 2000 2007 the period that korean firms relied on old production technologies despite facing rapidly strengthened environmental standards a difference in differences type identification strategy circumvents other potential confounders we find strong evidence that polluting industries tend to invest more in countries with laxer environmental regulations in terms of both the amount of investment intensive margin and the number of new foreign affiliates extensive margin a similar finding is obtained when imports are analyzed

choosing between risky prospects the characterization of comparative statics results and location independent risk we consider expected utility maximizers choosing from a family of risky prospects and examine how choice is influenced by the decision makers attitude to risk if the family of risky prospects can be ordered so that as decision makers are more risk tolerant they choose a gamble higher in the ordering then it is natural to say that the family of risky prospects admit a comparative static result the paper characterizes when comparative static results of this sort exist an application is to propose a criterion of location independent riskiness

how urbanization affects energy use in developing countries abstract this paper identifies mechanisms whereby urbanization affects energy consumption industrialization and urbanization accompany each other during economic development but urbanization exerts a number of independent influences on energy use it permits economies of scale in production but requires more transportation food must be transported to urbanized populations and relatively smaller agricultural populations must modernize entailing considerable increases in agricultural energy use in cities a number of production activities which were domestically provided in rural areas using human or animal energy shift to sources outside the household using modern energy sources the largest single source of change in energy use is personal transportation passenger transport in cities is heavily weighted towards fuel using modes particularly as incomes increase to assess the overall impact a regression analysis of 59 developing countries for 1980 is conducted holding constant per capita income and the extent of industrialization the elasticity of energy consumption per capita and per dollar of gdp is between 0 35 and 0 48

what drives the energy saving role of fdi and industrialization in east africa abstract analysis of the unconditional impacts of foreign direct inflows fdis and industrialization on energy intensity does not show the hidden roles of some economic conditions such as income and trade openness in this study we focused on the conditional impacts of fdis and industrialization on energy productivity using a panel data consisting of thirteen 13 east african countries covering 1980 2011 the baseline result shows that higher income and a well integrated economy are pro energy productive but fdis and intense industrialization are anti energy productive in the sub region this result remains robust even when we exclude the high income group and control for income group effects income significantly promotes energy productivity more in low income group than middle income group intense industrialization and fdis significantly decreases energy productivity only in low income countries trade openness significantly promotes energy productivity only in middle income group we have shown that fdis and income intense industrialization and fdis and intense industrialization and globalization are complementary forces that promote energy productivity in east africa but this is more evident for the middle income group than the low income group in the sub region based on the result we recommend a quadruplet programme called the growth industrial foreign investment and trade programme giftp last our result suggests that unconditional analysis of energy productivity should not be seen as an end in itself but a basis for further analysis