Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Single Minded? : Implementing Common Financial Systems, Mark E. Pickering

Mark E Pickering

As companies grow via acquisition they collect a variety of separate and often quite diverse financial systems belonging to the newly acquired companies. While there is a substantial cost to implementing a common financial system across the merged group. Is that cost outweighed by the benefits of a single system? This article uses a case study to highlight options for different degrees of finance system commonality, potential benefits of each option and a framework for analysing the appropriate level of commonality.

Not All Customers Are Created Equal: Looking At Lifetime Value, Mark E. Pickering

Mark E Pickering

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) refines customer profitability analysis to view customers as assets. Thinking in terms of CLV provides the impetus to target customer acquisition efforts on the right customers, and to improve the profitability and duration of the relationship with existing customers. This article introduces the concepts and benefits associated with CLV and actions to improve value.

Using Customer Profitability Information To Drive The Bottom Line, Mark E. Pickering

Mark E Pickering

This article utilises a case study of a textile manufacturer and distributor to demonstrate the use of customer profitability analysis to improve company profitability.

Poison Pills, Optimal Contracting, And The Market For Corporate Control: Evidence From Fortune 500 Firms, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

The rationale for issuing poison pill securities remains unclear, despite the findings of a large body of prior research that these defenses adversely affect shareholder wealth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that the adoption of such defenses may reflect shareholders’ desire to contract efficiently with their managers in an environment characterized by hostile takeovers and uncertainty about the managers’ true performance. Unlike previous research, we focus on financial characteristics of firms as they relate to the motives for adopting such defenses. Our empirical research does not support the optimal contacting hypothesis. We interpret our results as supportive of the managerial …

Dynamic Futures Hedging In Currency Markets, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

The hedging effectiveness of dynamic strategies is compared with static (traditional) ones using futures contracts for the leading five currencies. The traditional hedging model assumes time invariance in the joint distribution of spot and futures price changes thus leading to a constant optimal hedge ratio (OHR). However, if this timeinvariance assumption is violated, time-varying OHRs are appropriate for hedging purposes. A bivariate GARCH model is employed to estimate the joint distribution of spot and futures currency returns and the sequence of dynamic (time-varying) OHRs is constructed based upon the estimated parameters of the conditional covariance matrix. The empirical evidence strongly …

Positively Influencing Physicians: The Levers Of Influence, William Marty Martin

William Marty Martin

No abstract provided.

Uncertainty In Executive Compensation And Capital Investment: A Panel Study, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

We investigate whether uncertainty in CEO compensation influences the firm's investment decisions. We use panel data on compensation to estimate CEO income uncertainty and cross-sectional investment data to measure capital investment. Given the prospect of bearing extra risk, a rational agent reacts to minimize the impact of such risk. We provide evidence that CEOs with high earnings uncertainty invest less. We find that the negative impact of permanent earnings uncertainty on firm investment is larger than that of transitory earnings uncertainty. Our results are robust to several alternate specifications and can be helpful in building compensation packages that lead to …

Customer Profitability: The Approach Counts, Mark E. Pickering

Mark E Pickering

This article looks at alternative approaches to calculating customer profitability. It recommends a customer-focussed approach that takes into account the specific resources utilised to service each customer segment. In using customer profitability to make strategic and operational decisions it is vital that only costs relevant to those decisions are utilised.

The Performance Of Initial Public Offerings In The Biotechnology Industry, Todd A. Finkle, Dan French

Todd A Finkle

As Easy As Abc - An Introduction To Activity Based Costing, Mark E. Pickering

Mark E Pickering

This article is an introduction to the concepts and mechanics of Activity Based Costing and how it can be used to provide different views of the costs and profitability of organisations to support management decisions.

Ricardian Equivalence: Further Evidence, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

The Ricardian Hypothesis states that for a given level of government expenditure, aggregate demand is neutral to changes in the debt-to-tax ratio. Many economists argue that the private and government sectors have different planning horizons which will lead to deviations from Ricardian equivalence. In this paper, by using a model that nests both Ricardian equivalence and an alternative hypothesis, we empirically investigate whether the private sector has a shorter planning horizon than the government sector. The evidence presented in this study suggests that there is no difference between the planning horizons of the private and government sectors.

Agency Costs, Charter Amendments And The Market For Corporate Control, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

The merger wave of the 1 980s, coupled with the sophistication of investment Banks' financial engineers, brought about a bewildering array of takeover defenses: "poison pills", " classified boards", "fair price amendments", and the like. Surveys have documented steep growth in various defensive amendments adopted by firms in recent years. The Investors? Responsibility Research Centre (IRRC), in surveying 424 of the Fortune 500 firms in 1986, found that 143 had adopted poison pills, 158 had fair price amendments and 223 had board of directors divided into classes. Jarrell and Poulsen's (1987) research notes the same trend in a previous survey …

Intensity Of Takeover Defenses: The Empirical Evidence, Atreya Chakraborty

Atreya Chakraborty

This paper focuses on the construction of an index of the intensity of firms' antitakeover defenses. While many aspects of corporate behavior are qualitative in nature, an evaluation of a firm's stance and the underlying motives for its behavior often depend on the elements of a set of qualitative factors. The interactions between these factors are likely to have important implications. In this context, only a composite measure will capture these interactions and their implications for firms' actions. We focus on the creation of an ordinal measure of anti-takeover defenses and utilize the ordered probit estimation technique to relate the …

The Leverage Problem In The Valuation Of Privately Held Firms, Thomas D. Berry, John Houston

Thomas D Berry

No abstract provided.