New insights into inventory dynamics and its financial implications: Evidence for United States and international public companies

Classical inventory models offer a variety of insights into the optimal way to manage inventories of individual products. Can insights from these models be used to explain the inventory dynamics of entire companies? Can one also judge on the quality of company operations using only public data? The goal of this dissertation is to address those issues using empirical data and investigate it in details for a variety of industries and countries. We start in the second chapter with analyzing absolute and relative inventories using a quarterly data panel and find empirical evidence that firms operating with more uncertain demand, longer lead times and higher margins have higher inventory levels. Our results demonstrate that classical inventory models can help with high-level strategic choices in addition to tactical decisions. Next, in the Chapter 3, we show that superior earnings are associated with the speed of change/responsiveness in inventory management, after controlling for industry- and firm-specific effects. In the final step, in the Chapter 4 we empirically study inventory dynamics for a large sample of publicly held companies from OECD nine countries. Depending on the country, our model explains between 76% and 95% of the variation in the absolute inventory and we show that raw materials inventory is the cash cycle component that has the highest negative significant association with accounting performance

New insights into inventory dynamics and its financial implications: Evidence for United States and international public companies

Classical inventory models offer a variety of insights into the optimal way to manage inventories of individual products. Can insights from these models be used to explain the inventory dynamics of entire companies? Can one also judge on the quality of company operations using only public data? The goal of this dissertation is to address those issues using empirical data and investigate it in details for a variety of industries and countries. We start in the second chapter with analyzing absolute and relative inventories using a quarterly data panel and find empirical evidence that firms operating with more uncertain demand, longer lead times and higher margins have higher inventory levels. Our results demonstrate that classical inventory models can help with high-level strategic choices in addition to tactical decisions. Next, in the Chapter 3, we show that superior earnings are associated with the speed of change/responsiveness in inventory management, after controlling for industry- and firm-specific effects. In the final step, in the Chapter 4 we empirically study inventory dynamics for a large sample of publicly held companies from OECD nine countries. Depending on the country, our model explains between 76% and 95% of the variation in the absolute inventory and we show that raw materials inventory is the cash cycle component that has the highest negative significant association with accounting performance

Discordant results between conventional newborn screening and genomic sequencing in the BabySeq Project

Abstract Purpose Newborn screening (NBS) is performed to identify neonates at risk for actionable, severe, early-onset disorders, many of which are genetic. The BabySeq Project randomized neonates to receive conventional NBS or NBS plus exome sequencing (ES) capable of detecting sequence variants that may also diagnose monogenic disease or indicate genetic disease risk. We therefore evaluated how ES and conventional NBS results differ in this population. Methods We compared results of NBS (including hearing screens) and ES for 159 infants in the BabySeq Project. Infants were considered "NBS positive" if any abnormal result was found indicating disease risk and "ES positive" if ES identified a monogenic disease risk or a genetic diagnosis. Results Most infants (132/159, 84%) were NBS and ES negative. Only one infant was positive for the same disorder by both modalities. Nine infants were NBS positive/ES negative, though seven of these were subsequently determined to be false positives. Fifteen infants were ES positive/NBS negative, all of which represented risk of genetic conditions that are not included in NBS programs. No genetic explanation was identified for eight infants referred on the hearing screen. Conclusion These differences highlight the complementarity of information that may be gleaned from NBS and ES in the newborn period