Managing the threat of terrorism in British travel and leisure organizations

This paper examines the perceived threats from terrorism in six organizations in the travel and leisure sector in the UK. These organizations are particularly exposed to such extreme threats. This paper examines how managers in organizations deal with uncertainty where probabilities are impossible or difficult to define and examines how they face the challenge of interpreting and acting upon these interpretations. Theoretically the paper draws upon two lenses: organizational resilience and institutional perspectives. The former assumes managers can act autonomously to increase organizational resilience. The latter argues that systemic features of organization are more accurate explanations of why managers and organizations fail to spot threats and impending disasters. The data indicate that perceptions of uncertainty and threats from terrorism and theories of action differ in and between organizations depending upon factors such as the accuracy and completeness of information; previous experience of terrorist events and whether or not these threats were prioritized over other uncertainties. Three organizations in the aviation industry prioritize threats from terrorism, whilst three organizations in the leisure and travel sector do not. Managers in the aviation industry tend to take a proactive, organizational resilience stance towards uncertainty, whilst managers in the other organizations are more reactive, or take little action, with systemic features of organization taking precedence over decisions and actions

Consolidation in US banking: which banks engage in mergers?

The number of U.S. commercial banks has declined by some 40 percent since 1984, primarily through mergers of solvent institutions. The relaxation of legal impediments to branching has enabled this consolidation, but specific characteristics of banks that engage in mergers reflect the regulatory process and market structure, as well as the bank's own condition. This paper seeks to quantify the regulatory, market, and financial characteristics that affect the probability of a bank engaging in mergers and the volume of banks it absorbs over time. We examine separately consolidation within holding companies and mergers of independent banks.Bank mergers

Why do banks disappear? The determinants of U.S. bank failures and acquisitions

This paper examines the determinants of individual bank failures and acquisitions in the United States during 1984-1993. We use bank-specific information suggested by examiner CAMEL-rating categories to estimate competing-risks hazard models with time-varying covariates. We focus especially on the role of management quality, as reflected in alternative measures of x-efficiency and find the inefficiency increases the risk of failure, while reducing the probability of a bank's being acquired. Finally, we show that the closer to insolvency a bank is, as reflected by a low equity-to-assets ratio, the more likely its acquisition.Bank failures

New evidence on returns to scale and product mix among U.S. commercial banks

Numerous studies have found that banks exhaust scale economies at low levels of output, but most are based on the estimation of parametric cost functions which misrepresent bank cost. Here we avoid specification error by using nonparametric kernal regression techniques. We modify measures of scale and product mix economies introduced by Berger et al. (1987) to accommodate the nonparametric estimation approach, and estimate robust confidence intervals to assess the statistical significance of returns to scale. We find that banks experience increasing returns to scale up to approximately $500 million of assets, and essentially constant returns thereafter. We also find that minimum efficient scale has increased since 1985.Banks and banking ; Banks and banking - Costs ; Economies of scale

Evaluating the efficiency of commercial banks: does our view of what banks do matter?

Bank management

A Genetic Locus Regulates the Expression of Tissue-Specific mRNAs from Multiple Transcription Units

129 GIX- mice, unlike animals of the congeneic partner strain GIX+, do not express significant amounts of the retroviral antigens gp70 and p30. Evidence is presented indicating that the GIX phenotype is specified by a distinct regulatory gene acting on multiple transcription units to control the levels of accumulation of specific mRNA species. The steady-state levels of retroviral-homologous mRNA from the tissues of GIX+ and GIX- mice were examined by blot hybridization using as probes DNA fragments from cloned murine leukemia viruses. RNA potentially encoding viral antigens was reduced or absent in GIX- mice, even though no differences in integrated viral genomes were detected between these congeneic strains by DNA blotting. Tissue-specific patterns of accumulation of these RNA species were detected in brain, epididymis, liver, spleen, and thymus, and several distinct RNA species were found to be coordinately regulated with the GIX phenotype. Measurements of RNA synthesis suggest a major role for transcriptional control in the regulation of some retroviral messages

Are credit unions too small?

Since 1985, the share of U.S. depository institution assets held by credit unions has nearly doubled, and the average (inflation-adjusted) size of credit unions has increased over 600 percent. We use a non-parametric local-linear estimator to estimate a cost relationship for credit unions and derive estimates of ray-scale and expansion-path scale economies. We employ a dimension-reduction technique to reduce estimation error, and bootstrap methods for inference. We find substantial evidence of increasing returns to scale across the range of sizes observed among credit unions, suggesting that an easing of regulations on credit union membership or activities would lead to further increases in the size of credit unions.Credit unions

A matrix representation of graphs and its spectrum as a graph invariant

We use the line digraph construction to associate an orthogonal matrix with each graph. From this orthogonal matrix, we derive two further matrices. The spectrum of each of these three matrices is considered as a graph invariant. For the first two cases, we compute the spectrum explicitly and show that it is determined by the spectrum of the adjacency matrix of the original graph. We then show by computation that the isomorphism classes of many known families of strongly regular graphs (up to 64 vertices) are characterized by the spectrum of this matrix. We conjecture that this is always the case for strongly regular graphs and we show that the conjecture is not valid for general graphs. We verify that the smallest regular graphs which are not distinguished with our method are on 14 vertices.Comment: 14 page