Exposure-Based Cash-Flow-At-Risk for Value-Creating Risk Management Under Macroeconomic Uncertainty

A strategically minded CFO will realize that strategic corporate risk management is about finding the right balance between risk prevention and proactive value generation. Efficient risk and performance management requires adequate assessment of risk and risk exposures on the one hand and performance on the other. Properly designed, a risk measure should provide information on to what extend the firm's performance is at risk, what is causing that risk, the relative importance of non-value-adding and value-adding risk, and the possibilities to use risk management to reduce total risk. In this chapter, we present an approach exposure-based cash-flow-at-risk to calculating a firm's downside risk conditional on the firm's exposure to non-value-adding macroeconomic and market risk and to analyzing corporate performance adjusted for the impact of non-value-adding risk

How a firm's domestic footprint and domestic environmental uncertainties jointly shape added cultural distances : the roles of resource dependence and headquarters attention

Even though many firms conduct most of their business domestically, international management research has remained remarkably silent on the role of a firm's domestic footprint in its internationalization strategy. We shed light on that role by exploring how the size of a firm's domestic footprint influences the cultural distance that the firm adds to its country portfolio when expanding internationally. Integrating resource dependence theory and the attention‐based view, we hypothesize that a firm's domestic footprint has a negative relationship with added cultural distance (ACD), and that domestic policy uncertainty strengthens this relationship whereas domestic demand uncertainty weakens it. We find robust support for our hypotheses in a sample of the world's largest retailers covering the period 2000–07, indicating that a firm's domestic footprint and domestic environmental uncertainties jointly shape cross‐cultural expansion strategies. Our findings suggest that ACDs reflect headquarters executives' desire to avoid ineffective foreign expansions, hinting at possible biases in studies of the performance effects of distance

Regional integration, multinational enterprise strategy and the impact of country-level risk: the case of the EMU

The European Monetary Union (EMU) provides a new macro-level, institutional setting for multinational enterprises (MNEs). The authors investigate the impact of regional integration on MNE strategy by analysing Belgian firms’ entry-mode choices in foreign markets, both EMUand non-EMU ones, with a focus on what impact remains of countrylevel risk. They demonstrate that regional integration has altered the impact of countrylevel institutional risk on MNE entry-mode choices inside the EMU. The conventional predictions of international business theory have been reversed, with higher country-level risk inside the EMU driving a preference for wholly owned subsidiaries.Within the integrated region, insider firms now view higher country-level risk as the equivalent of higher, micro-level contracting risk. Such risk can best be mitigated through full internalization, combined with arm’s length contracts, rather than through equity joint ventures

Identidad étnica y redes personales entre jóvenes de Sarajevo

After fieldwork conducted among young people in Sarajevo, we found a relation between the discourses sustained by them and the ethnic categories they use to classify people and to identify themselves. Also we have found that people self-affiliated as "Bosnians" play an important role in the network of multiethnic relationships, in which strong ties, surprisingly, are still very important. Finally we found a relationship between the composition of personal networks and the ethnic discourses that are maintained.Después de un trabajo de campo realizado con un grupo de jóvenes en Sarajevo, hemos constatado la existencia de una relación entre los discursos que sostienen y las categorías étnicas que utilizan tanto para clasificar a los demás como para auto-identificarse. Asimismo hemos encontrado que los jóvenes que se autodenominan "Bosnios" juegan un rol importante en la red de relaciones multiétnicas, en la que los lazos fuertes, sorprendentemente, son muy importantes. Finalmente hemos hallado una relación entre la composición de las redes personales y los discursos étnicos que se sostienen. Vivimos, o creemos vivir, en múltiples "comunidades", imaginadas o no. Al mismo tiempo, el individuo y no el lugar, la familia o el grupo, se sitúa en el centro de la vida social y de las comunicaciones (Cf. Wellman, 2001). En este contexto, inducido por el avance del capitalismo flexible (Castells, 1996), pensamos que para entender adecuadamente la identidad o identidades postuladas por los individuos es necesario estudiar las redes personales y su dinámica. Desde esta perspectiva no podemos hablar de "etnias" o "multietnicidad" sin más precisiones, pues son conceptos basados en una concepción esencialista y estática de la identidad individual. El concepto de "sociedad multiétnica" es utilizado de una manera engañosamente progresista y objetiva, pues lo que en realidad legitima es la existencia de diferencias esenciales entre personas, alejando en lugar de acercar. Sin embargo, somos plenamente conscientes que los discursos esencialistas de la identidad étnica son omnipresentes, con enormes efectos políticos e individuales. Que planteemos que la concepción esencialista de la identidad sea inapropiada desde un punto de vista académico, no significa que ésta no se utilice políticamente y por lo tanto tenga consecuencias formidables en las relaciones sociales. Precisamente el estudio de las redes personales nos permite situarnos en una perspectiva que no utiliza con pretensiones analíticas conceptos "folk", como son los de "etnia", "pueblo" o "nación", sino que los sitúa en el terreno de los discursos sustentados por los actores (y los estados y medios de comunicación) y nos permite contextualizarlos mediante conceptos etic, es decir, impuestos por los investigadores. Sólo así podemos superar las tautologías que abundan en los discursos étnicos