Diversification and expansion in large diversified New Zealand companies : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography at Massey University

Diversification and spatial expansion are investigated in relation to eight Type III companies in New Zealand. The case companies are delimited on the basis of a three stage classification of corporate growth and organisation. The conceptual background to the thesis also includes an examination of more general aspects of corporate decision making, strategy, and the expansion and impact of firms in space. Two areas of research are examined - (a) the incidence and nature of diversification in the eight companies, and (b) spatial aspects associated with diversification and expansion. A case study approach is used to outline the diversification and spatial expansion of the companies over time. A three-fold classification of diversification is proposed: diversification within and between activity groups and diversification function. Diversification is then viewed in relation to the respective growth developments of the case companies. On the basis of these accounts, a number of conclusions are drawn on the temporal development of diversification in the spatial expansion of the eight companies. Diversification was found to be an important component in the corporate growth and geographic expansion of the case companies. Furthermore, a review of the geographic distribution of their activities suggests the companies have an important contribution to national and regional development in New Zealand

Corporate diversification and R&D intensity dynamics

We study the dynamic bidirectional relationship between firm R&D intensity and corporate diversification, using longitudinal data of Spanish manufacturing companies. Our empirical approach takes into account the censored nature of the dependent variables and the existence of firm-specific unobserved heterogeneity. Whereas we find a positive linear effect of R&D intensity on related diversification, the evidence about the effect of related diversification on R&D intensity takes the form of an inverted U. Hence, the effect of related diversification on R&D intensity is positive but marginally decreasing for moderate levels of related diversification, but such effect can turn out negative for high levels of related diversification. Additionally, the consequences of the dynamic relation are that the effects are substantially larger in the long-run than in the short-run

PENGARUH STRUKTUR KEPEMILIKAN DARI CORPORATE GOVERNANCE PADA BADAN USAHA PUBLIK YANG TERDIVERSIFIKASI DAN TIDAK TERDIVERSIFIKASI DALAM HUBUNGANNYA DENGAN LAYANAN BAGI PIHAK INTERNAL DAN EKSTERNAL BADAN USAHA

The stakeholders of the firm have the same objective to the survival of the firm. In order to survive, the firm can diversify its line of business. Through diversification the firm gets several benefit, such as financial synergy, increasing debt capacity, and earning stability. However, there are possibilities that the managers do the diversification for their personal intention, such as prestige, higher compensation, and risk-shelter. Since there is a difference between the goal of shareholders and managers, then it will induce the agency conflict. Therefore diversification could have positive and negative side to the firm. The strategy of doing diversification is influenced by ownership structure and corporate governance. The proxy for corporate governance are leverage, size of the firm, growth opportunity, and financial performance. This research try to test the influence of both factors above by using logit regression model. The result is that only size of the firm gives a siginifcant influence to the diversification strategy. The possible explanations are still few public firms do diversification, many firms are owned by family member, and there are nonfinancial factors, such as the composition of board of directors

Efficient Diversification of Web Search Results

In this paper we analyze the efficiency of various search results diversification methods. While efficacy of diversification approaches has been deeply investigated in the past, response time and scalability issues have been rarely addressed. A unified framework for studying performance and feasibility of result diversification solutions is thus proposed. First we define a new methodology for detecting when, and how, query results need to be diversified. To this purpose, we rely on the concept of "query refinement" to estimate the probability of a query to be ambiguous. Then, relying on this novel ambiguity detection method, we deploy and compare on a standard test set, three different diversification methods: IASelect, xQuAD, and OptSelect. While the first two are recent state-of-the-art proposals, the latter is an original algorithm introduced in this paper. We evaluate both the efficiency and the effectiveness of our approach against its competitors by using the standard TREC Web diversification track testbed. Results shown that OptSelect is able to run two orders of magnitude faster than the two other state-of-the-art approaches and to obtain comparable figures in diversification effectiveness.Comment: VLDB201

Diversification in the international construction business

Economic globalization has created an interdependent market that allows companies to transcend traditional national boundaries to conduct business overseas. In the international construction market, companies often adopt diversification as a strategy for growth, for risk management or for both. However, the diversification patterns of international construction companies (ICCs) as a group are barely clear. The primary aim of this research is to cover this knowledge void by mapping ICCs’ diversification patterns in both business sectors and geographical dispersal. It starts from a literature review of diversification theories. Based on the review, a series of hypotheses relating to ICCs’ diversification are proposed. Data are gleaned from Engineering News-Record, i.e. Bloomberg and Capital IQ, ranging from 2001 to 2015. By testing the hypotheses, it is found that larger ICCs prefer to diversify than their smaller counterparts. Most of the ICCs tend to diversify to geographical markets with similar cultural or institutional environment. Market demands drive ICCs to diversify to different geographical markets while they are more prudential in venturing into new business sectors. The research provides not only valuable insights into diversification patterns of ICCs, but also a solid point of departure for future theoretical and empirical studies

Herbivory increases diversification across insect clades.

Insects contain more than half of all living species, but the causes of their remarkable diversity remain poorly understood. Many authors have suggested that herbivory has accelerated diversification in many insect clades. However, others have questioned the role of herbivory in insect diversification. Here, we test the relationships between herbivory and insect diversification across multiple scales. We find a strong, positive relationship between herbivory and diversification among insect orders. However, herbivory explains less variation in diversification within some orders (Diptera, Hemiptera) or shows no significant relationship with diversification in others (Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Orthoptera). Thus, we support the overall importance of herbivory for insect diversification, but also show that its impacts can vary across scales and clades. In summary, our results illuminate the causes of species richness patterns in a group containing most living species, and show the importance of ecological impacts on diversification in explaining the diversity of life

Complex Valued Risk Diversification

Risk diversification is one of the dominant concerns for portfolio managers. Various portfolio constructions have been proposed to minimize the risk of the portfolio under some constrains including expected returns. We propose a portfolio construction method that incorporates the complex valued principal component analysis into the risk diversification portfolio construction. The proposed method is verified to outperform the conventional risk parity and risk diversification portfolio constructions

Does diversification improve the performance of German banks? Evidence from individual bank loan portfolios

Should banks be diversified or focused? Does diversification indeed lead to enhanced performance and, therefore, greater safety for banks, as traditional portfolio and banking theory would suggest? This paper investigates the link between banks? profitability (ROA) and their portfolio diversification across different industries, broader economic sectors and geographical regions measured by the Herfindahl Index. To explore this issue, we use a unique data set of the individual bank loan portfolios of 983 German banks for the period from 1996 to 2002. The overall evidence we provide shows that there are no large performance benefits associated with diversification since each type of diversification tends to reduce the banks? returns. Moreover, we find that the impact of diversification depends strongly on the risk level. However, it is only for moderate risk levels and in the case of industrial diversification that diversification significantly improves the banks? returns. --focus,diversification,monitoring,bank returns,bank risk

Diversification of Indian Agriculture: Composition, Determinants and Trade Implications

The pattern of diversification across states/crops in India has been schematized and various determinants of diversification have been deciphered. To objectively confer the empirical resonance, values of Simpson index have been estimated. The diversification index (SID) has been found to range from 0.47 (WB) to 0.90 (Karnataka) in 1990-91 and from 0.40 (Orissa) to 0.92 (Karnataka) in 2000-01. The increase in diversification Index signifies shift towards non-foodgrain crops. In Karnataka, though the Index has increased, but the similar increases in area under foodgrain imply shift from coarse to fine cereals. Agricultural diversification is influenced by a number of infrastructural and technological factors. The coefficients have indicated that the presence of electricity and road density are negatively associated with the diversification. In the year 2001-02, large share of export earnings has come from non-traditional items, namely rice, fruits, vegetables, livestock and marine products, signifying positive boost to diversification. Indian agriculture has witnessed diversification with impressive improvements in the shares of livestock and fisheries sectors in the total income from agriculture. Within the crop sector, the diversification has largely been in favour of non-foodgrains crops in most of the states. However, diversification in these states has not been essentially for income generation, but also for the risk-mitigating proposition. However, harnessing the potential of diversification presupposes gradual restructuring of diversification hindering market institutions, infrastructure and quality standards.Agricultural and Food Policy,