Security-voting structure and bidder screening

This paper analyzes how non-voting shares affect the takeover outcome in a single-bidder model with asymmetric information and private benefit extraction. In equilibrium, the target firm’s security-voting structure influences the bidder’s participation constraint and in response the shareholders’ conditional expectations about the post-takeover share value. Therefore, the structure can be chosen to discriminate among bidder types. Typically, the socially optimal structure deviates from one share - one vote to promote all and only value-increasing bids. As target shareholders ignore takeover costs, they prefer more takeovers and hence choose a smaller fraction of voting shares than is socially optimal. In either case, the optimal fraction of voting shares decreases with the quality of shareholder protection and increases with the incumbent manager’s ability. Finally, shareholder returns are higher when a given takeover probability is implemented by (more) non-voting shares rather than by (larger) private benefits

Extreme correlation of international equity markets

Testing the hypothesis that international equity market correlation increases in volatile times is a difficult exercise and misleading results have often been reported in the past because of a spurious relationship between correlation and volatility. This paper focuses on extreme correlation, that is to say the correlation between returns in either the negative or positive tail of the multivariate distribution. Using "extreme value theory" to model the multivariate distribution tails, we derive the distribution of extreme correlation for a wide class of return distributions. Using monthly data on the five largest stock markets from 1958 to 1996, we reject the null hypothesis of multivariate normality for the negative tail, but not for the positive tail. We also find that correlation is not related to market volatility per se but to the market trend. Correlation increases in bear markets, but not in bull markets.International equity markets; volatility; correlation and extreme value theory

Reputation-based pricing and price improvements in dealership markets

In many security markets, dealers trade with their regular clients at a discount relative to prevailing bid and ask quotes. In this article we provide an explanation to this phenomenon. We consider a dealer and an investor engaged in a long-term relationship. The dealer assigns a reputational index to his client. This index increases (reputation decreases) when the client conducts trades which results in a loss for the regular dealer. The dealer grants a price improvement if and only if the client's index is smaller than a threshold and suspends price improvements otherwise. We show that this pricing strategy induces the investor to refrain from exploiting private information against her regular dealer. We also find that it worsens the quotes posted by other dealers. For this reason, there are cases in which the investor is better off if long-term relationships are impossible (for instance, if trading is anonymous). Our model predicts that a dealer's decision to grant a price improvement depends on his past trading profits with the trader requesting the improvement.Market microstructure; Reputation and Implicit contracts; Non-Anonymous trading

Dynamic modeling of web purchase behavior and e-mailing impact by Petri net

In this article, the authors introduce Petri nets to model the dynamics of web site visits and purchase behaviors in the case of wish list systems. They describe web site activities and their transition with probability distributions and model the sequential impact of influential factors through links that better explain web purchase behavior dynamics. The basic model, which analyzes site connections and purchases to explain visit and purchase behavior, performs better than a classical negative binomial regression model. To demonstrate its flexibility, the authors extend the wish list Petri net model to measure the impact of e-mailing intervals on visit frequency and purchase.internet; wish list; e-mail; Petri net; dynamic model

Measuring idiosyncratic risks in leveraged buyout transactions

The authors use a contingent claims analysis model to calculate the idiosyncratic risks in Leveraged Buyout transactions.Idiosyncratic Risk; LBO; Private Equity; Benchmarking; CCA

Controlling price volatility through financial innovation

In this paper, the authors study the possibility of controlling asset price volatility through financial innovation in a three-period finite competitive exchange economy with incomplete financial markets and retrading.incomplete markets; financial innovation; volatility

Does marketing and sales integration always pay off? evidence from a social capital perspective

Building on social capital theory, the authors view the marketing and sales interface as a set of inter-group ties and investigate how firms (1) generate value from inter-group relationships and (2) develop the social capital embedded in these relationships. Their findings suggest that social capital enhances, but can also limit, a firm’s performance depending on the characteristics of its customers. Their results also demonstrate that managing the marketing and sales interface at different levels of customer concentration is critical to the success of a firm’s performance.Marketing organization; sales organization; interface; social capital theory.

Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism

The purpose of this paper is to cast a new light on the post-Sombartian debate. It contributes to some understanding of the birth of the concept of capitalism itself. The author argues that the history of how the concept of capitalism was invented is an example of the influence of accounting ideas on economic and sociological thinking.capitalism; accounting; Karl Marx; Werner Sombart

Roles, authority and involvement of the management accounting function: a multiple case-study perspective

Recent techniques and shifts in the environment are often foreseen as leading management accountants to adopt a business orientation. However, empirical evidence pointing to fundamental shifts in the roles played by management accountants remains relatively scarce. The authors explore this paradox and give sense to the various roles played by the management accounting function by focusing on how management accountants are involved in and endowed with authority in decision-making situations.management accountant; role; business partner

From Rent-Seeking Activities to Economic Activities: The Strategic Transformation of the Deregulated Firm

The political theory of regulation holds that deregulation of utilities obliges the former monopoly to abandon its rent-seeking activities to concentrate upon economic activities. However, the arguments presented by scholars to explain this strategic transformation are not entirely convincing. We argue in this paper that the role and the nature of the firm during the deregulation process have been underestimated in previous works. After describing the main steps of this process, we thus propose a dynamic explanation of the strategic transformation of the deregulated firm based on the concepts of firm capabilities, access to rents and transaction costs.rent-seeking; strategic renewal; capabilities